On September 15th, my cousin drowned at Lake Almanor, California. This is day three of my experiences during the week that followed.
I wake up and put on the same clothes I’ve been wearing for three days. I had a short reprieve when I slept in some of my aunt’s yoga pants, but now I’m back to the old standbys. Fortunately my husband is coming up today.
Or maybe unfortunately. He’s bringing the kids.
Search and Rescue pinpoints the location of the 911 call on the lake. They develop a timeline to try to figure out how far the boat may have drifted when my aunt saw it. The sonar boats crisscross the water like players on a chessboard.
It turns out Logan is considered “small.” He may not be lying flat. He may have drifted. They keep checking out leads that turn out to be logs. They keep coming up empty handed.
In my stupidity I thought they would just look for a while and find him without much trouble. But this is like one of those Roadblocks in The Amazing Race where people have to search through ten thousand green apples to find the one red one or try to open 800 locks to see which one fits your key. I’m not sure why everything sounds like The Amazing Race.
Word has started to spread, and people start calling and texting. Not just our phones but Logan’s. What do you say to someone who calls Logan’s phone…
I’m having longer conversations about what happened. We’ve all put together our theories. Maybe he had a seizure. Maybe he had more to drink than we thought. Maybe he was swimming on the side of the boat that was downwind, went under, and when he came up, the boat had moved and he bumped his head on the bottom. The last theory starts to grow legs and we hear ourselves repeating it more and more.
My uncle and aunt from Chicago arrive. The people I was so worried about. He’s remarkably pulled together. She cries and cries. We cry and cry. Every time someone new shows up it’s like we have to rewind and start over.
My younger cousin’s friends arrive, and I’m beyond grateful. He didn’t want to bother them. Didn’t want them to miss school. At 21-years-old, I would’ve looked nothing like him in this situation. I’d have been the Lucille Ball to his Mahatma Gandhi.
The kids arrive. I don’t try to hide that I’m sad. I never have. Hysterical sobbing, tearing at my clothes, that sort of thing I hide. Sad, not so much.
My son has brief moments of breaking down. He’s empathic, just like me. We cry at the same time during movies. We cried during Lord of the Rings. We cried when the blind woman won Master Chef. So this. . . this, is a nightmare.
He wants to help find Logan. He examines the boat after we bring it out of the water. He wants to walk the shoreline. They both go with us over to the staging area. I explain everything that’s going on. Everything the search and rescue people have done. Everything they’ve found. Then I get to the cadaver dogs.
This is what brings it home for my son. I see it in his eyes. The processing is done. He gets it. His Logan is gone.
We sit on a boulder at the marina and cry. Then he takes a long walk with his dad. In the meantime, my daughter informs me that she’s decided not to feel sad until she’s sure there’s something to feel sad about. I tell her to do whatever she thinks she needs to do. I sit there and marvel at her ability to compartmentalize as she eats some potato chips that the rescue workers give her. Maybe someday when I grow up, I’ll be able to not worry until there’s something to worry about.
When the sun goes down, I have another minor panic attack. I walk down to the dock to get some air. As I sit there in the dark, watching the light reflect off the water, the last thing I can do is relax. First, I keep thinking that this is exactly how the dumb girl gets killed in every horror movie. And then, even though I know it’s ridiculous, I can’t stop picturing Logan’s body floating up out of the water. This completely freaks me out, and I cry my way back to the cabin.
I take an Ambien and fall asleep with my computer and phone next to me. My husband has to put them away.
Read the next chapter: Tuesday — I Leave the Lake
Tammy Soong is a writer, wife, and mom from Reno, Nevada. She takes an absurd amount of pain medication, but not enough to have actually named her children "Newt" and "Elfie." She spends most days stressing out over clutter, writing stuff for this place, and working on podcasts with her gal pals, the Blogging Betties.