It was a disgustingly beautiful day to be plodding across Lake Michigan. There wasn’t a wisp of the somber, angry clouds Lydia had pictured when imagining the first time visiting her son in prison. She squinted at the sun and got up from her plastic seat to depart to the lower cabin, refusing to enjoy any part of her voyage.
“I can drive you,” her husband Alan had offered when she’d first brought up the idea of seeing Jake. “But I’m just not ready, hun.”
She’d shaken her head. “It’s five hours to Muskegon. I can just cut across on the ferry and it’ll take half the time.”
She’d been on the Lake Express once before, to visit her sister. Jake had been five, and Amelia was just a baby. Her son had given her a heart attack whenever he’d leaned over the deck to stare at the waves below, whooping in delight when they crested the hull and sprinkled his face.
“Don’t you ever scare me like that,” she’d whispered in Amy’s ear, inhaling the sweet smell of her scalp.
Now she sat alone in the empty cabin with a sweating board of charcuterie sitting before her. She picked at the cheese on her plate, pairing it with a stale cracker. It all tasted like ashes.
The cruise from the Milwaukee port to Muskegon felt so short when the kids were tiny. Jake hadn’t sat still for the entire trip, racing from the bow to the stern and begging to gallop down to the garage level to see the cars.
“Calm down and take a seat,” she’d told him. “Your sister’s sleeping. Why don’t you try relaxing too, kiddo?”
“You can’t risk sleeping out here, Mom,” her son had said solemnly. “Or the lake monster is going to get you!” He’d launched himself onto her lap, arms outstretched and fingers wiggling as Amelia wailed and toppled from her grasp.
“Jake!” she’d shrieked, scooping up her daughter. “You have to be more careful! You’re the big brother, you need to look out for her!”
Lydia shook the memory away. Jake had never been good at staying still. She worried how he was handling himself now, with so much time in that cramped cell and nothing to help with the pain.
She’d researched the Muskegon Correctional Facility immediately after her son’s sentencing and was relieved to find that the level II prison didn’t sound as terrifying as it had in the courtroom. “It says on the website that they have welding and horticulture classes,” she’d told Alan. “He can even get a bachelor’s degree, if he wants.”
Alan blinked, exhaustion sagging from the creases in his face. “Frankly, I don’t care what he does to pass his eight years there, but I doubt he’ll even complete the rehab program, let alone a college degree.”
He’d trudged upstairs, leaving her alone with her laptop in the kitchen. She heard him stop in front of Amy’s room. They still hadn’t touched anything since the night of the crash. She listened for a beat, wondering if he’d finally open the door, but the floorboards above her began to creak again and the television in their room turned on.
Amelia would not want you to hate him, she’d told herself every day since the accident. It was the thing that kept her standing, the only reason she could think of her son and see the smiling five-year-old mimicking a lake monster, and not the junkie whose selfishness had murdered her daughter.
She and Alan spent years paying for treatment programs and therapy to save their son. They had pleaded, and roamed the streets searching for him, and let him pawn their heirlooms, until it just became too much. At Christmas three years ago, they had been ready to wash their hands of it all. He wasn’t coming. But Amelia couldn’t accept it.
“This is my last Christmas before I leave for school,” she’d said. “He needs to be here.”
Lydia had refused to go with. She’d let her seventeen-year-old daughter take the car and go search for her addict son in the middle of a storm on Christmas Eve, and her little girl had never come home.
She never found out how or why Jake ended up behind the wheel. It was a miracle that Amy even found him, and a puzzle as to why she let him drive. He was high out of his mind and smashed into a barrier going the wrong way down I-94. His collarbone was shattered, Amy was brain-dead. He had been given every opportunity to fix himself and his family, and instead demolished it beyond repair.
She watched the calm water settle around the ship through the starboard window. But at least he might learn to weld, she thought.
Suddenly it felt hard for Lydia to breathe. How could she do this? How could she face her daughter’s killer through the paltry barrier of a prison cell? How could she forgive him?
She needed air. She raced to the top deck, pushing past other passengers to reach the bow railing. Tears brimmed in her eyes, threatening to add to the sea spray drizzling the terrace. The same spray her young son had marveled at.
Toward the end of their commute, he’d ambled up to her with his head hung low. “You know,” he said, “lake monsters aren’t always bad guys, Mom. They seem bad because they’re big and scary and sometimes accidentally hurt people.” He nudged against his sleeping sister, burrowing into Lydia’s arm. “But they don’t always mean it.” His doe eyes stared up at her. “And I bet they’re always sorry.”
She had hugged him close and kissed his forehead. “I love you, my little lake monster,” she’d said.
“I love you, my monster,” she whispered now, as the ferry prepared to dock in Muskegon. She would fight for that little boy, despite what he had done, what he had become. “I love you, my son.”
Kate Niestrom (she/her) is a writer of speculative and contemporary fiction with a degree in Creative Writing and Communications from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Her fiction has been published in Adelaide Literary Magazine and her non-fiction essays have been published on Thought Catalog. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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