By Amorak Huey

Twenty-some years since the drowning and we all still struggle to breathe. So when my brother tells me we’re running out of money and could lose the property, well, it just feels sort of inevitable.

*

Jimmy — Jimmy Jr. or JJ at first, Jim for a while, now James in a coat and tie — moved as soon as he could, toward drier land: college in South Bend, job in Kansas City, finally settling in Phoenix to raise a family as far from water as possible.

Sam stayed. Still runs the resort, but you can see the burden he carries in his sloped posture, hear it in his slow way of speaking. He’s the safest person you ever met: a whole existence quilted from seat belts and speed limits and guard rails and life preservers. 

Dad died when we were in our late teens or early twenties: heart attack, officially, but we knew the ending was inscribed into his body a decade earlier, that midsummer day in 1983. Quiet before, quieter after; broken.

Mom seems fine, if you don’t know her, loud and loony as ever, but there’s a hollowness to it. It was always an act, but the veneer is thinner: the desperation underneath slipping to the surface more easily, more often.

Me, I left, came back for two weeks after college, left again, back now for I guess as long as mom needs me. “She can’t do it on her own,” Sam said to me on the phone.

“But you’re right there,” I said.

“I can’t, Mare,” he said. “I just .. look, can you come home?”

So I gave notice at a job I mostly enjoyed, packed my North Florida apartment into a rusty Ford Taurus, and moved back to the lake in the woods in the middle of Michigan, the green house behind the camp store, the pink bedroom waiting for me like a museum of my childhood, as if the place knew all along I’d be back.

*

I say drowning, but really it was a disappearance.

My uncle Steve, my cousins Alyssa and Donnie. They were twins, Jimmy’s age, so six years old than me. Thirteen at the time. Thirteen forever. They lived in the red house next to our green one. My granddad built them both, along with the camp store and the dozen cabins clustered at the east end of the lake. 

Land rich, cash poor, we were. Are. The resort brings in money but is expensive to maintain. Steve and my dad came back from Vietnam, found wives, and ran the place together with their father until he died of lung cancer when I was maybe five, ran it on their own after that. 

*

I keep talking about how people died. But the story of a family is always also the story of death. It’s what families do: die off, one at time usually, sometimes in bunches.

Aunt MaryAnne — I’m named after her — died giving birth to the twins. My grandmother died before I was born, run into a ditch by a drunk in a pickup in the middle of the afternoon, on her way home from the Thrifty Acres in town. My mom’s parents died when I was pretty young: lung cancer and also lung cancer. They’d snow-birded to Florida by then, somewhere north of Tampa, so I didn’t know them well, Christmases and one chaotic family road trip to Disney. 

*

They’d gone out fishing. Couldn’t be more normal. It’s what we did more often than not in the summers, up before sunrise and out exploring the edges of the lake. My dad or Uncle Steve, some combination of the kids. It was a special day when both the brothers would go. All of us kids wanted to go with them those days because they acted like boys again — the most we ever saw them laugh. 

That day was just Steve and the twins. No one up to see them off. Mid-day before it started feeling wrong. 

After lunch my dad took his boat out. I think all the time about what it must’ve been like for him, finding Steve’s boat, floating, empty: that moment of sudden aloneness. Did he call their names? How long did he circle that boat in hope? I know he dived in because I was there when he came back to call the county sheriff, his clothes still wet. 

Never found the bodies, though they looked for weeks. Lots of theories, each darker than the one before. A terrible accident, unless it wasn’t. Steve was a drinker but not when he was on the water. He was kind of hard on the kids but so were most of the dads we knew. That’s just how things were in this part of the world back then. Doesn’t mean anything sinister happened. Some things aren’t meant to make sense.

*

We’re standing on the pier when Sam tells me about the money. Sun setting behind the trees. It’s March, the snow mostly melted. 

“There’s still a chance,” he says. “A good summer, we got a shot. But either way it goes is fine with me, honestly.”

I’m surprised by this but probably shouldn’t be. He deserves to be untethered from this place. 

“Where would you go?”

“Grand Rapids, maybe? Lots of stuff I could do. Sell snowmobiles. Jane and the kids would be happier in a city anyway.”
I start to ask what he thinks about Mom, but don’t. She doesn’t really have friends around here anymore. It would be my problem, not Sam’s, that’s the deal we’ve made without talking about it. 

“Be weird, wouldn’t it?” he says, gazing out at the darkening lake. “Not to be here. None of us. After all this time.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Yeah. I mean, yeah.”

But that’s the way it works, right? The way it has always worked. You’re here until you’re not. The water takes you or it lets you leave. 

                                                                      *   *   *

Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024).