The Monster of Twenty Mile Pond Read online

  In a low voice and thick words, she protested to me against the overreaction of the police in raiding the party. The complaints they’d received of loud noise, underage drinking, and fights were unwarranted. “And on top of that, Uncle Bill,” she slurred earnestly, “the cops violated everyone’s privacy by taking down our names. This police brutality will go down in the history of North America”—she paused for effect but couldn’t resist a grin—“as the Friday Night Massacre.”

  “Not funny,” said Maggie.

  “Wasn’t this the same party,” I asked, “that Molly was at? She was home by ten o’clock.”

  “Yesh, and she toally”—I think she was trying to say “totally”—“begged me to leave with her when the beer started to arrive, but”— Esme abruptly gained her feet and weaved down the hall, her mouth scrunched tight and her cheeks ballooning. Maggie sighed and started wheeling after her. I placed my hand on her shoulder and said I’d go.

  When I entered the bathroom, Esme was on her knees holding on to the sides of the porcelain bowl for dear life and vomiting violently into it. In between paroxysms, her face threatened to sag down into the mess, and I gently held her head back while I flushed. At the sight of her anguished, beautiful young face, my tears began to flow. She seemed to be in such emotional pain.

  My mind flashed back to when she was a little girl of eight, a few years before the accident, when she’d stood solidly in front of me and said, “Uncle Bill, Dad says that my name has to go back thousands of years. He says there was a very old language that a lot of languages these days came from—English, Spanish, Russian, and lots of others—languages all the way from Portugal to India and North and South America. He says my name looks like it comes from an old word that meant ‘I am.’ It’s still the same sound, almost, in English and other languages now, years and years later. Esme, I am, is me—get it? Cool, huh?”

  “Very cool,” I’d said. “To have stayed the same so long means those sounds must have been something people everywhere wanted to keep forever.”

  When she stopped being sick in the bathroom, I left her there to wash her face and went out to sit with my sister. She stayed silent, looking at the floor. “No big deal, Maggie,” I said. “Growing pains.”

  “You think?”

  “Remember that time,” I said, “—what were you, sixteen?—when you sneaked out your bedroom window two o’clock in the morning, climbed down from the garage roof to meet your friend, and both of you hightailed it off to rendezvous with your boyfriends in Bannerman Park? Do I recall correctly that there was Portuguese brandy involved that you got from some sailors off the White Fleet, and that Dad grounded you for a month and—”

  “Okay, okay,” said Maggie, raising her left hand a little, the hand she could move, from the armrest of her wheelchair. “You’ve got a good memory, Billy boy. But look how well I turned out.” She snorted out a laugh.

  Esme crept back into the room. “I don’t blame you for laughing,” she murmured. “Because I’ve been really stupid. I’m so sorry, Mom and Uncle Bill. I only meant to have a bit of fun. It won’t happen—”

  “I wasn’t laughing at you, Esme,” said Maggie. “There was nothing funny about what you did tonight. And it was beyond really stupid. More like really moronic. And, sweetheart, I know it won’t happen again, because, just as we love you, we know you love us.”

  Esme closed her eyes and nodded at her mother.

  “Can I help you into bed, Maggie?” I asked.

  “No, I will,” said Esme. “I’ll get the medicine.” Maggie’s medication, I knew, was to prevent the painful muscle spasms that would otherwise keep her awake most of the night.

  Esme still looked shaky, so I sat in the living room and waited until Maggie’s preparations for bed were completed. It must have taken a half-hour or more, a lot of it spent in the bathroom.

  I’d asked Maggie a few times if she should have extra home care for a couple of hours at night before bed, but she always declined. “It’s already costing an arm and a leg, no pun intended, for the six hours I have now. We’ll cut that back soon, too.” And Esme would chime in that she could do the nighttime care because she was usually home from her part-time job before her mother went to bed. No, I could never deny that, usually, Esme was a great girl.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A few months after the drunken episode, Esme and two other female teenaged scofflaws were charged with shoplifting at one of the bargain stores. They were accused of stealing hiking socks, of all things. My daughter Molly had been with them, but in another aisle altogether when they got caught, and was not implicated. Somehow Esme always managed to keep Molly out of the trouble she got into herself.

  I may be a lawyer, but I’m a civil lawyer with very little idea of any criminal law procedures, let alone those under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, so I put a smart young associate with the firm on her case. His name was Brian Keeping and he came back from his meeting with Esme like someone in love. “She’s a really funny girl,” he said, grinning like a chimpanzee.

  “What do you mean by funny, precisely?” I asked. “Funny ha ha, or funny yikes?”

  “Oh, definitely funny ha ha. She’s got a great sense of humour. She says our defence should be that the aisles at the store are made deliberately narrow, so that all the merchandise is close as you pass it, and that no normal mortal could resist grabbing something and shoving it under their jacket. We have to convince the judge, she says, that the store is to blame for luring and entrapping their customers into shoplifting.” Brian laughed, utterly charmed.

  I shared none of his appreciation of my niece’s precocious judicial brilliance. “Just get her out of this,” I muttered. And lo, Brian, by some intervention procedure, or diversion program, or extrajudicial whatnot, all invented by the caring professions, managed to do just that.

  Molly told me that Esme had really needed those socks—that she’d developed a horrendous blister on the side of her little toe on their last hike—but she didn’t have the money to pay for them.

  “Didn’t have the money to pay for a pair of socks? What’s she doing with the money she makes at the fast-food place?”

  “Dad, Esme will kill me if she hears I told you this. Her mother’s credit card is up on bust, but she made Esme swear she wouldn’t let you know. Aunt Maggie is doing everything to cut down on expenses, but stuff costs so much. . . . Every single cent Esme makes goes to her mother. Dad, the only time she’s a little bit happy is when she’s on a long hike in the woods.”

  I wished to myself that Maggie would let me know of these needs before her daughter ended up down in the penitentiary. But I well realized how keenly she felt that she was a burden on my family, and it made her very reticent about her financial problems. I arranged to funnel more money to her with a soft suggestion that she let me know if Esme needed anything else to outfit her for her hiking or any other positive pastime.

  The second-last serious incident, the one before the current catastrophe, involved a wild animal. Esme and Molly and some of their friends were walking on one of the footpaths in the rich trail system of St. John’s. Esme was carrying her hiking pole with her. We all knew, because she told us, that her pole was not to assist her in walking, but served solely as protection. I’m sure she got that idea from me. A few months earlier, after a walk on Signal Hill, I’d complained to my wife in front of the girls that some dog owners allowed their big, poop-bloated mutts to run around off their leashes and leave their business wherever and whenever on the trails, which was all bad enough, but, if one of those pit bulls or huge mastiffs with their massive jaws took it into its head to attack me or anyone else near me, it would be their last act. I was getting a nice, handy, steel-tipped hiking pole. I never did, but a while later, there was Esme, lifting and wielding her pole with a fencer’s dexterity to display her skill and its sharp metal point. Being all too fam
iliar with her history, I couldn’t fault her for being hyper-cautious in the face of animals that could injure or kill.

  The girls weren’t familiar with the trail they were walking on that day; they tried to choose a different one each time. They were surprised when a grey fox bounded out of the underbrush toward them. But then the animal stopped and swerved toward two women walking along ahead of them with young children. Molly said afterwards that the fox really looked to them like it was about to attack the kids, the way it quickly slunk along, low to the ground, ears back, teeth clearly showing. The parents of the children insisted to the police, however, that it was merely being friendly, as it always was. Whatever the case, Esme lunged toward the fox and took a ferocious swing at it with her pole. She missed it by inches—deliberately, she would contend afterwards—and the fox snarled and made guttural sounds as it stood its ground, crouching. Esme swung at it again, this time grazing the fox’s back with the point of her pole.

  The women and kids erupted in shrieks as the fox snarled and then backed away yelping before it turned and scurried into the underbrush. The girls gathered from the screams and wailing that the women and children were familiar with the fox and believed that it was only approaching them in the hope of food. One of the women called the police on her cellphone and the girls hung around until they arrived.

  Esme told the police that, judging by the look of the fox and the way it had approached, she believed it to be rabid. The women yelled that that was utter nonsense: there was a whole family of foxes nearby that everyone knew about and which had become friendly with people. They would come within feet of hikers, who often tossed food to them. Everyone knew that foxes on the Avalon didn’t have rabies. The police took names and addresses and the next day they laid charges against Esme under the animal cruelty laws for wilful abuse of a protected animal.

  I put our young lawyer, Brian Keeping, on this case, too, and he insisted to the police that one of foxes be trapped and tested for disease. Upon their refusal, he had to obtain a court order requiring wildlife officers to trap a fox and test it. The prosecution was arguing that everyone familiar with the locale knew the foxes had been there for months and were as tame and friendly as household pets. But, to everyone’s shock, except Esme’s, the tests showed that the fox in fact did carry the beginnings of rabies; the disease was in the stage known as the prodromal, usually associated in wild animals with unusual behaviour, including overfamiliarity and aggression toward humans. The whole family of foxes had to be trapped and destroyed.

  The charges were dropped, and one of the women on the trail was quoted in the newspaper thanking the young lady for “perhaps” saving their kids from a rabid bite. She seemed rather dubious, though, that Esme could have known of the rabies from a glance at the fox, since the vet had said that even a trained wildlife expert would have had difficulty in distinguishing the fox’s rabies symptoms from its conditioned sociability. I had a chat about all this with my niece and daughter.

  I told Esme straight that she had been spared criminal conviction by pure dumb luck. She went very quiet for a minute and closed her eyes. Then tears began to flow from under her eyelids, although she didn’t cry. “I’m sorry, Uncle Bill,” she said, “but I did know that the fox was sick. I just knew. I love animals a lot, but if I see a situation where an animal might hurt some innocent person, I’m going to act.” She lowered her head almost down to her hands on her lap, and shook with silent sobs. Molly and I went over to her and put our arms around her, and I knew that all three of us were meditating on the devastating accident that had happened to her family when Esme was twelve years old.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Esme’s father, Jack Browning, was an impressive, likeable man. He never advanced this information, but Maggie told me he was co-laterally related to the poet Robert Browning. His great-great-great-grandfather, like Robert Browning’s grandfather, was part owner of a plantation worked by slaves in the West Indies, and his great-great-grandfather, like Robert Browning’s father, became revolted by the slavery and left the Caribbean. The poet’s father went back to England; Jack’s ancestor went to Canada.

  Maggie had met Jack in Ontario when she was studying social work on a scholarship at Queen’s University. Jack was an engineer, ten years older than Maggie. He had an affiliation with the university and was married with two sons, three and four years old. He and Maggie discovered they both had a great affinity for English language and literature. They would have done graduate work in English at university and written poetry and novels, they told each other, had they not both subscribed to rule number one for any prospective writer: pay the darn rent. Hence, engineering and social work became their income earners. Jack fell hard for Maggie.

  Maggie didn’t encourage him beyond friendship, she always told me—heavens, he was a married family man—but he stayed in touch with her when she came back here. Then, out of the blue, without conferring with Maggie, she said, he separated, got a divorce, and moved to St. John’s to pursue her. His ardour broke up the engagement between Maggie and her fiancé. She married him; six months later Esme was born.

  Twelve years after that, Esme and her mother and father were driving from St. John’s to Trinity on the Bonavista Peninsula. They were to join another family there, spend a couple of nights at a B & B, and explore the region. Molly had been due to go with them, but she had to cancel because of a bout of food poisoning. They had been planning to leave right after work on Friday, but the delay caused by Esme’s futile attempt to persuade Molly out of her sickbed meant an hour’s driving after dark. With the ever-present danger of a collision with a moose, especially as rutting season approached, nighttime driving was taboo.

  They left early Saturday morning with Jack behind the wheel, Maggie in the front passenger seat, and Esme in the back seat. She had been silent and sad, she told me, still wishing that Molly had been well enough to go. Jack had the cruise control set at 109 kilometres an hour, acting on his theory that the RCMP never ticketed people for speeding if they were driving under 110.

  Not far from the Come By Chance turnoff on the clear, dry Trans-Canada Highway, Jack was looking at Esme in the rear-view mirror and asking what CD she’d like to hear, and Maggie was turning her head to smile at her daughter, when Esme saw, between them through the windshield, directly ahead, a big bull moose bounding out of the ditch onto the road. Seconds went by before she could speak. Just after she shouted “Dad, watch out!” their car struck the moose.

  The huge animal with its long spindly legs was just the right height to slide up over the hood of the car and crash through the windshield. An unimaginable stench was Esme’s immediate sensation. According to the police report, the moose’s belly had been ripped open on impact with the front of the vehicle. The car rolled off the pavement and plowed along the shoulder and the shallow ditch for many metres before coming to a stop, still upright.

  That position was an unfortunate fluke, the investigators said, because if the car had turned over a couple of times, the beast may well have been shaken loose. But the moose stayed attached to the car, with most of its torn belly inside enveloping Jack’s head and face. A rear hoof had also come through the broken glass.

  Esme could hear her father’s horrible groans. Meanwhile, the rear hoof of the animal was kicking and thrashing, and Esme saw it strike her mother on the side of the head. Esme undid her seat belt and tried to help her father, but it was all she could do to keep her face away from the moose’s flailing hoof. It struck her forearm, laying open the skin and breaking the bone.

  She pushed open her door and got out, with the intention of trying to pull her father from under the moose with one hand. The front part of the moose, from its forelegs to its huge head and antlers, projected past the side of the car, barring her way. As people picked their routes down the slight slope from the road, waving and shouting, one big moose eye stared at Esme, wide with terror. (Then it seemed t
o become sad, she told us later; the last thing she saw was the eye glazing over in death.) And the last thing she heard were her own screams: “Get Dad out, get Dad out!” and “Help Mom. He kicked Mom in the head.”

  But they couldn’t get her dad out in time; when they got him out, he was dead. The ambulance attendants applied whatever techniques they could to her mom. Maggie was alive but unconscious, and her skull appeared to be fractured. Esme went into shock, and some anonymous person wrapped her up in a blanket to keep her warm and applied a tourniquet to her arm, which the ambulance attendants, when they arrived, credited with saving her life.

  In hospital, lying in bed with her arm in a sling, Esme surprised us by musing softly on how ironic the police statement was, the part where they claimed that excessive speed may have contributed to the accident. In fact, their car had been the slowest one on the road, she murmured, with all the other vehicles passing it like it was going backwards. No, it wasn’t caused by Dad driving too fast, she said; she herself had caused the accident. What happened was all her fault.

  He wouldn’t have been looking back at her in the first place, trying to cheer her up, if she hadn’t been acting like a contrary child. And she had let seconds go by after seeing the moose before alerting her father. If she’d told him at once, with his reflexes—everyone knew how good Dad was in goal in the masters hockey league—he could have missed the moose completely. He would’ve had about thirty metres, nearly a hundred feet, to work with.

  My wife, Jennifer, and I looked at each other. Esme had it all calculated out, the mathematics that proved her dreadful guilt.