Easter

The loaf was braided, in three strands, with an egg baked into the top of it, dyed red, and almonds, and it was on a board in the middle of the table four floors up with the window behind it white with April sun over the bus depot.

“Osterkranz,” said Anneliese Hartigan. “My grandmother’s. From Milwaukee.” She cut it. “Anybody who sits at this table.”

“Eats what’s on it,” said Kate, Theo, Peter Hartigan and Frederick, together.

Anneliese Hartigan looked round the table at the four of them, very slowly, and put a slice on each plate without a word, and the corner of her mouth went in.

---

Kate had brought news of Professor, who had been discovered by the residence in March and had been allowed to stay on condition that he was classed as an emotional support animal, which Bethany said was only accurate. Theo had a bowl of eggs in front of him, dyed blue and green and a red that had gone brown, and was eating them one after another with salt with the concentration he gave to apples. Peter Hartigan was in his shirtsleeves at the end of the table nearest the window, with the bus company jacket over the back of his chair even on Easter Day, and had been looking at Frederick since they sat down with an expression Frederick knew.

It was the expression of a man who had been waiting a long time to tell a story and had decided that today was the day.

“Freddie,” said Peter Hartigan.

“Mr Hartigan.”

“You remember what I said on the apron.”

Theo stopped eating eggs.

“You said I’d used up the canoe.”

“I did.” Peter Hartigan put his fork down. “And I said I’d have to tell her.” He looked down the table at his wife. “I’ve been waiting ten months for an occasion. Anneliese says Easter is about telling the truth about things that happened, more or less. I’ve decided this counts.”

“Peter,” said Anneliese Hartigan.

“It counts,” said Peter Hartigan.

Kate had put down her slice of loaf and was looking from her father to her brother to Frederick with the face of somebody who has been told there is a story in the family she does not know.

“What canoe?” said Kate.

---

He told it.

Not well. Peter Hartigan was a man who could take a bus with seventy people on it through the capital in the rush hour without anybody noticing he had done anything, and who could not tell a story in order to save his life. He started in the middle, and went back to the beginning, and got the year wrong, and Theo corrected him, and he got the lake wrong, and Frederick corrected him, and after a while the two of them were telling it between them and Peter Hartigan was sitting back in his chair with his arms folded looking very pleased with himself, as though that had been the plan.

August 2026. They had been thirteen. Theo’s first time out of the Realm: a week at Lac du Roi in the Laurentians, in New Albion, at the old lodge on the lake where Frederick’s father had spent the summers since 1972, and Frederick most summers since he was six. Pine trees to the water. A dock. A boathouse with canoes in it, red, cedar, older than either of them.

“We’d been told,” said Frederick. “Not before seven. Not without Castellanos.”

“We’d been told about forty times,” said Theo.

At five in the morning, on the Thursday, it had been perfectly calm. The lake like glass, grey, with mist lying on it in long white bands, and a loon somewhere, and the sun not up. They had looked at each other at the window of the room they shared, and gone down to the boathouse in their socks with their shoes in their hands.

“Whose idea was it?” said Anneliese Hartigan.

Theo and Frederick looked at each other.

“His,” said Theo.

“Mine,” said Frederick.

Anneliese Hartigan looked at them both and let it go.

---

They had paddled out to the island. A mile, perhaps. A small one, rocks and pines, in the middle of the lake. They had wanted to see the sun come up from it. It had come up. It had been, both of them agreed, worth it.

Then the wind.

“It came over the hill,” said Theo. “From nowhere. One minute glass and the next minute there were waves. White ones.”

“A squall,” said Frederick. “The lodge’s caretaker said afterwards they get them in August. Off the hills. Twenty minutes and then gone.”

They had been halfway back. The canoe had gone round in the wind like a leaf. Then a wave had come over the side, and then another, and then Theo had leaned the wrong way, or Frederick had, they still did not agree which, and the canoe had gone over.

“How cold was the water?” said Anneliese Hartigan.

It was the first question. She asked it the way she asked about the brown under Theo’s nails: as a fact she needed.

“Very,” said Frederick. “It was August. But it’s a mountain lake.”

“How long were you in it?”

“About ten minutes,” said Theo. “Holding the canoe. It floats upside down. We held on to it and kicked.” He looked at his eggs. “Freddie kept saying the lodge was that way. He kept pointing. It wasn’t that way. It was the island. We kicked back to the island.”

“You kicked back to the island,” said Anneliese Hartigan.

“It was closer,” said Frederick. “I’d worked it out.”

“He’d worked it out,” said Theo. “While we were in the water. He did a sum.”

---

They had got the canoe onto the rocks on the island and lain on the rocks beside it, soaked, shaking, in the wind, at six in the morning, thirteen, a mile from the lodge, with no paddles, because the paddles had gone.

“And then,” said Peter Hartigan, coming back into the story with great satisfaction, “Castellanos.”

At twenty past six a motorboat had come round the point from the lodge, very fast, bouncing on the waves. A borrowed one, the caretaker’s, with an outboard engine that had never been asked to go that fast. And in the stern, at the tiller, soaked to the waist from the spray, in a T-shirt and the trousers of his suit and nothing on his feet, the protection officer.

“He’d heard the boathouse door,” said Frederick. “At five. He’d got up and seen the canoe gone. He’d watched us from the dock with binoculars all the way to the island. He’d watched the squall come. And when we went over he’d run to the caretaker’s cabin and taken the boat.”

“Did he shout?” said Kate.

“No.”

“He didn’t say anything,” said Theo. “Not one word. He got us in the boat, and wrapped us in a tarpaulin, and took us back to the lodge, and put us in front of the stove in the kitchen, and made us hot chocolate. And then he went outside and stood on the dock for half an hour by himself looking at the lake.” Theo turned an egg over. “Then he came back in and said if either of you does that again I will resign, and we said we wouldn’t, and he said I’m not going to tell anybody, and he didn’t.”

“Not anybody?” said Anneliese Hartigan.

“Not the Household. Not my mother. Not my father.” Frederick looked at the table. “Not you.”

“But Theo told me,” said Peter Hartigan. “When he got home. In the van from the airport. He told me the whole thing in the van, because he couldn’t not, and he made me promise not to tell his mother.” He looked at his wife. “So I didn’t. For four years.” He spread his hands. “And then on the apron in June you said Freddie’d never done anything stupid in four years, and I thought, well, that’s not right, and it’s been bothering me since.”

---

Anneliese Hartigan was quiet.

She sat at the table with her hands in her lap, and looked at her son, and at Frederick, and at her husband, and out of the window at the bus depot, where the buses stood in their rows in the Easter sun with their blinds set to NOT IN SERVICE.

Kate had her hand over her mouth.

“You were thirteen,” said Anneliese Hartigan.

“Yes.”

“In a mountain lake. In a squall. With no adult.”

“Yes.”

“And you swam back to an island because you’d done a sum.”

“Kicked,” said Theo. “Not swam.”

Anneliese Hartigan looked at her son.

Then she looked at Frederick, the way she had looked at Theo on the apron with his wrists in her hands, reading the brown under his nails.

“And the sum was right,” she said.

“Yes.”

“The island was closer.”

“By about four hundred yards. I’d measured it from the dock the day before. With a map.”

She looked at him a moment longer.

Then she did something Frederick had not seen her do in four years at that table. She put her head back and laughed, out loud, helplessly, with her hand flat on the table, until Kate started too, and then Peter Hartigan, and then Theo, with an egg in his hand, and the window over the depot rattled in its frame.

“Four hundred yards,” said Anneliese Hartigan, when she could. “He measured it. With a map.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Of course he did.”

She stood up and went to the stove.

“Peter,” she said, with her back to them. “You kept that from me for four years.”

“I promised,” said Peter Hartigan. “Properly.”

His wife turned round with the pan in her hand.

“Then you did right,” said Anneliese Hartigan, and put the pan down on its mat, and sat. “Eat that. All of you.” She looked at Frederick. “And next time it’s August and there’s a lake, Freddie, you come and tell me first. Before the boathouse. I won’t stop you. I’ll just want to know which way the island is.”