Slow River - Nicola Griffith Page 0,61

dragged places unwillingly must find their own way back. She wonders what place he has found, what he has seen.

But then Oster slips and falls to one knee. He stands up making cross sounds, and sloshes his way back to the edge. “I’m going inside to change,” he says to Stella, who has her face tipped up to the sky and seems to be smiling. “When I get back I expect you to be sobered up and decent.” He stalks off. “I will not be mocked in my own house. . .”

Katerine is examining the vodka bottle, seemingly unperturbed. Lore glances back at Tok, who is now sitting still and sad by his pile of twigs. She catches his eye and he shrugs slightly. Lore does not understand, but she knows no one will explain; she does not even know the right questions to ask.

When Oster is out of sight, Katerine, still not looking at Stella’s body, says, “Your father has asked you to be decent by the time he returns.”

“Does my body offend you, Mother?” The words are a challenge, but the tone is tremulous, as though Stella has gone much, much further than she intended, and does not know her way back. Katerine turns slowly, deliberately, and looks at Stella.

Lore wonders what Stella sees in her mother’s eyes. Her sister goes utterly blank. She steps from the pool mechanically and reaches for her dress. No one says anything while she fastens her buttons. She looks at the bottle, but Katerine is still holding it. Lore understands that Stella is unwilling to step any closer to her mother to reach for the vodka.

Stella, hair dripping, uncertain whether to reach for the bottle or leave without it, looks like a whipped dog.

“Your father will want to see you here when he gets back,” Katerine says. She smiles, and Stella sits abruptly, leans back against the stone fountain rim, and closes her eyes. Just like that, she absents herself. Gone. Lore has seen Greta do that: just disappear. Tok returns his attention to whatever he is building from sticks.

Katerine lifts the bottle from the stone rim, checks to make sure the cap is secure, then looks at Lore speculatively. “Tell me,” she says, “if Stella had dropped the bottle in the fountain and it was, by some miracle, both uncapped and full, how would you have gone about the remediation of the pond system?”

Water tinkles, the sun beats down, and Tok strips the bark from a twig while Lore tries to work out the approximate flow per minute in gallons from this fountain to the next pond and the next; the effect of about a pint of raw alcohol on the flora and fauna; the breeding rate of carp . . .

Tok makes some involuntary movement.

“What?” Lore asks.

He sighs. “It’s a trick question, Lore. We were taught that the first thing to remember when faced with—”

“The first thing to remember when faced with a problem,” Katerine interrupts, “is not to make the problem more complicated than it is. With this surface area,” she gestures at the series of ponds, “and this heat, a pint of vodka would evaporate before it did any damage that would not remediate itself naturally in a week or two.”

Lore digs a hole in the turf with her finger. She feels stupid, the idiot younger sister, the one who never knows what’s going on, the one always left out of the joke. But when she looks up, Katerine is smiling at her and it’s a nice smile, not cruel at all.

“You looked like you were working out some pretty complicated reactions. Had you considered and included the lethal-fifty dose for fish?”

“Yes,” Lore admits shyly, “except I don’t know the alcohol concentration L-fifty for freshwater fish so I was going on the figures I read in that report last year on the spill of ethanol in the salmon fishery in Scotland, so—”

“You read that?”

Lore nods cautiously. “I try to read as much as I can.”

Katerine smiles. No, she beams, and Lore cannot remember getting that kind of approval from her mother before. She smiles back, tentatively.

“That Scottish job was complicated by the fact that the ethanol was contaminated by printers’ ink.” Katerine absently fills a plate, hands it to Lore.

“I know. I tried to compensate for that. But it was mostly guesswork.”

“It often is, at least in the evaluation phase of a project.” Katerine begins to fill another plate for herself. “Did you try for a differentiated flow

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