The Lake [Last Part]

“Dad, stop, they might see,” I had begged him. He paused only long enough to look up at me.

“Everyone knows we been doing up this car, son,” he said. “No one will think a thing about it.”

He was right of course. Everyone was too busy looking at Dean and Pete Ryan. The police looked right at the car as they sat in our house and looked away again. My dad bought a new headlamp to replace the smashed one and took the car in for a new paint job after he’d banged out the dent, and no one ever said a thing except to ask what colour he wanted it.

But for all those years afterward when I went out there to the lake, I couldn’t stop myself imagining it. My dad in the darkness hauling the body from his car. Carrying him over the stones so as to not leave a trail, and how he did that I didn’t know.

He dropped him in all the way round the far side where trees grew low into the water and no one ever swam, and it was time enough before he was found for what evidence there was to be lost.

I could only imagine it because I had sworn to never speak of that night, not to anyone. Not even him.

The memory I carried was buried inside me now, of driving up the road to test the brakes on the car and rounding a corner and seeing him there. The animal look of him in my headlights, the drunken lumber, the glowing eyes, and for a instant I saw again him barging me in the hallway of my house, hitting my sister in his own house.

There was a moment I could have braked and didn’t. I could have swerved and didn’t.

My dad was there in minutes after I called him, stood with me looking at the lifeless shape of Kyle Lewis on the side of the road. There was the sound of something deep in the night, frogs and birds, coming from the bush.

Then he put his hands on my shoulders, looked at me steadily.

“Listen to me, this is my fault. I was the one driving. You got that? You can never speak about this again, do you understand?”

He pressed his own keys into my hand, ordered me to drive his car home and shower and go to bed and forget this ever happened. I got into his car and saw in the rear-view mirror the car there on side of the road, my father beside it, phone in his hand.

That moment was the end of my first life, the hazy days of childhood where anything felt possible. The life which came after was both darker and clearer, the knowledge of exactly what I was.

“Who’d you call that night?" I asked him. "I’ve always wondered.”

I didn’t know if he’d answer. I’d made a promise to him, and that was what we did. We kept our word. He’d protected me all these years.

“I called Dean Ryan. Told him I’d hit someone on the road and I needed his help. We go back a long way, me and him. He helped me dump him out there.”

He nodded his head toward it, the lake we couldn’t see from here but could feel. It was something which would always be there between us, the dark magnet of the past, pulling at us.

“What’d you have to do for him?”

Dean Ryan did no favours. What he gave, you paid for. My dad looked at me again, and I felt the weight of all the things I didn’t know.

“It was bad for him, everyone seeing Kyle still walking around after ripping him off. I paid off Kyle’s debt to him, and he let people think what they wanted.”

I thought then of Dean Ryan’s long silence. Denying or admitting nothing. The silence which had grown between me and my dad. All of us bound by it.

That night I had known, as I always had, my father would do anything to protect me. Because I knew what sort of man he was; one who took care of his own. Same as I was.

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