Emily nodded. She crossed her arms over her chest, suddenly cold.
You have to figure out how to love me.
The light changed then, a column of it falling from the blue, enormous Oklahoma sky, and Connie changed, too. She was an adult, at a kitchen table. A room enclosed them, the weather now outside, tapping at a small window to get in.
Sit down, Connie said. Let me help you.
•
Emily woke to the continuing sound of rain. Jonathan had wrapped the pillow around his head and kicked the blankets to the floor. Jonathan was so deeply asleep that she didn’t even moan or break the hum of his snoring when she got out of bed and felt for her shoes and her robe on the floor.
In the kitchen, she drank a glass of water and watched the rain streaking the window. She switched on the porch light, which revealed a swamp, the road overflowing. She went to the hallway closet and took out her only jacket. It wasn’t waterproof, but it had a hood. She took out her rain boots and a heavy flashlight which she’d bought before her road trip and had never used until now.
She’d reach the lake in just a few minutes if she went straight through the woods. She knew the way.
The rain pounded against her jacket, and though the flashlight was drenched and she feared it would short, it shone through the trees and rain. She had not imagined how peopled and active the woods would seem in the rain and how much what she’d learned about Levi and the lake would make her body revolt against her movements. She felt herself shivering, not from cold, but from some deep part of herself trying to keep her from going forward. She had to force every step.
She didn’t look beyond the light or behind her. If she looked backward, she might turn back. If she paid attention to things that seemed to be moving in her peripheral vision, she might turn back. And she couldn’t turn back.
She’d had another dream conversation with her mother. They were sitting at her new kitchen table in Fran’s house, her own house now, at the gouged countertop. Connie was as Emily last remembered her—thin, her hair wispy with pink patches of scalp showing through. She lifted her hand to stir the milk and sugar into her coffee and Emily saw the bruises on her wrists from the IV’s and the sticky, black edges of the tape that had held the tubes around her nose and mouth. She didn’t shake, as she had at the end, and wore a light, white dress. Just before the end, she grew so cold, even in rooms heated to 80 degrees, and always needed a blanket around her chin. Even when she could still speak, quietly, but still coherently, her toes and fingers had already started to lose heat. Emily had found this particularly painful, insulting even. Connie’s mind was still working; she understood what was happening even as she lost the feeling in her toes and fingers.
Emily, she said, stirring her coffee tan. Do you remember when we drove to West Virginia? You were eight. We drove together, just the two of us, and went to Black Mountain Caverns? Do you remember how I pulled you to me as the elevator dropped us down to the bottom? How scared I made you because I bruised your arm? It was because I was afraid, you understand? I was afraid that you’d be hurt. You struggled and pulled yourself away from me and out of my arms, but I held you tighter and I was angry with you, because you did not understand how afraid I was and how much I needed you to simply let me hold you.
Emily nodded. She did remember, but she remembered it differently. She remembered the elevator’s sudden shift down and grabbing at her mother’s clothes, afraid of flying off into the dark of the cave where the dim lights reflected off of what had seemed like sharp stalactites. Emily remembered fearing that she would fall from the elevator (it only had a bar, waist-high, keeping her from the cave walls). She remembered, too, that her mother had pushed her away.
Connie continued to stir, and then took another spoonful of sugar from the opened bag.
And do you remember when I drove you to school, the first day of first grade, and how you cried and I told you to stop, that you had to be a big girl? After you left, I stayed in the car, watching you as you weaved among the other children. Those other children, they didn’t matter, do you understand? They didn’t matter to me. You entered that building, dry-eyed after some sweet, young teacher showed you your new classroom, and I cried until my eyes were swollen and drove home slowly so I wouldn’t wreck, I was so afraid of having you away from me for a whole day. That’s how foolish you made me because I loved you and I couldn’t help it.
She looked up, her under eyes purple and translucent in the sunlight of the room. Emily turned her head to see the light source—the kitchen window, opened out to the day. It wasn’t raining anymore. It was noon, the sun full above them.
You have everything you need, she said. So stop it. Stop the anger. You think because you don’t say it and are quiet and alone it isn’t there, but it is. You aren’t fooling anyone. Your mother knows you, even if you don’t want her to know you. Let it go. Stop wanting what wasn’t possible and want what you actually had.
It took Emily ten minutes to reach the water, she walked so slowly and carefully through the muck. She heard it before she saw it. The rain beating against the lake sounded different than the rain against the leaves—flatter and more insistent. Then, she hit a patch of soaked ground, and her boots were ankle-deep in water. She sloshed through until the trees ended and she reached what was once the shore. She was now knee-deep in water. The surface of the lake was black with little flashes of pale light where the rain hit the surface.
She took off the rain slicker and let the water hit her. She was soaked immediately. The water at her knees was as cold as river water, but she stripped off her clothes anyway until she was down to her underwear. She turned off the flashlight, leaving herself in darkness, and put it in the pocket of her slicker, which she draped in the shoulder-high branches of the closes tree. She waded out until the water reached her chest, and then she dove.
•
She was not the only one at the lake that night.
Levi woke from a dream he could not remember. He’d bitten into his inner cheek in sleep and tasted salt. He held the side of his face as it throbbed. Above him, the rain pounded against the roof.
Then, it all rushed back to him: Frannie’s death, the community dinner where he had planned to lead his flock back to God, but had succeeded only in making a fool of himself and convincing nobody. The memory made his stomach churn. He deserved the pain. He had not been the man of God he should have been. He could not convince them of the clear, but difficult path of righteousness.
He sat up in bed. It was still raining. Levi stood up and dressed carefully, choosing his best suit and his best shoes. He wore a raincoat over his jacket and plastic boots over has shoes, a habit he could not break, despite what he was planning. Yet another piece of evidence pointing to the obvious: he was too wed to the body and its needs, to the things of the world, even in a moment like this.
Outside, his feet sunk into the lawn. The car would be useless—he’d have to walk.
•
Emily didn’t allow herself to register the cold and slide of broken branches and slimy grass that brushed against her feet and thighs. She held her tongue back away from her chattering teeth and brought herself back in time:
Her first sleepover, at five, when she cried in bed until her best friend’s mother (she couldn’t remember the friend anymore, only the sudden feeling of all of the air being sucked out of her chest, the feeling of her throat closing up) made her get out of bed and marched her back to her mother’s house, where she could not help but hiccup and cry until she was back in her own bed, Connie sitting by and smoothing down her hair until she could sleep.
In first grade, after failing to get a perfect score on a spelling quiz (the word
momentum
, easy when she thought of it, had momentarily escaped her), and after Tamara, the girl who sat in back of her in Math class, had tugged at her hair and said she didn’t brush it, clearly, because there was a big knot in the back, Emily sat waiting for her mother to come get her for ten minutes after the last bell had rung. She’d watched the other kids leave the school and enter the buses (which had seemed happy, full of people talking and laughing and not frightening, loud, and tribal, as they had when was actually inside of one) or their parents’ waiting cars and felt the bruise of self-pity growing. The world hated her. But then Connie drove up, just as tears were at the edges of her eyes, and said
get in, silly. I’m taking you out for ice cream
. The relief had been so sweet, so unexpected, that even thinking of that feeling brought up a sliver of comfort.
And, after her first middle school dance, when everyone else had matched up, boy and girl, until she was left alone, she had left the auditorium decorated with purple and pink crepe paper and the floor piled with glittering confetti and run home, a mile at least, Connie had brushed out her hair, set so carefully in the curls and pins hours before, saying only that she was happy to have Emily home, that the house had been lonely without her. She had not asked Emily why her eyes were red or why she’d torn a hole in the knee of her stockings and had not scolded her for walking in the dark at night.
Emily had more moments like this, ones she hadn’t thought of in years: they ran in a loop, the memories fresh for being so scarcely used. Her arms began to burn, but she did not allow the feeling to penetrate her mind. She focused on the repetition swish of water past her ears and the thoughts.
She had loved her mother. The thought surprised her and she stopped, treading water. She had loved her mother and all this time, she’d thought otherwise. She was mistaken about her own feelings, which seemed impossible. But she had loved her. She had cried when physically separated from Connie, had sought her comfort, had been delighted, more times than she could count, at her presence.
I loved her, she said out loud, her voice no match for the rain, which still pounded against the water. I loved her.
•
He’d played in the lake as a child, as everyone else who grew up in Heartshorne had, though with caution: like everyone else, he had heard the rumors about the fog, had been rushed, suddenly, from the water by his grandmother and mother on particularly damp and misty nights. He didn’t swim in front of his parishioners—after he became a pastor, he thought it a bit unseemly to go out in swimming trunks, his body exposed, the hair around his nipples and on his back showing to everyone. He had to keep an air of separation.
Perhaps that was why it had been so easy for the lake to take him. It spoke a language he didn’t understand anymore but once had—like a child who knows Spanish at birth but speaks English now, who suddenly, upon passing a group of Spanish speakers realizes that he understands what they are saying. And so, the lake knew him, and he had not been able to refuse it.
The walk to the lake was quick, and in the pounding rain, he heard it long before he reached the water lapping into the leaves and sticks of the woods—it had risen far beyond the shore.
Much like Emily, he removed his clothes carefully and folded them at the shore. It had seemed important to dress well to bring himself to the lake, to show that he was still himself and not beaten, but now, the thought of sloshing in the water, his clothes dragging the twigs and branches, his body swollen and still grotesquely dressed like a live person, seemed silly. Better that he show himself naked now, showed that he understood that he would leave the world as he’d been brought into it. So he undressed and waded into the water.
It was cold, and his body recoiled. He moved slowly, inch-by-inch, wondering if it were better just to plunge in and get it over with.
Silly. This is the last time you’ll have to feel the cold. Why think about it? Even now, at the end, he couldn’t let himself go. He shook his head and dove into the water. The cold hit him—an enormous slap—and he began to swim, his body energized.
He planned to swim out into the middle of the lake until his body was exhausted. Then, he would dive down, swimming deeper and deeper. People drowned accidentally all of the time. Surely he could make himself drown on purpose.
•
The lake was still. She felt the burning of cold in her arms and legs, but also a throbbing in her head like something trying to get in through her ear. Her body could not take much more of this.
I loved her, she said aloud again, that’s all I have. What can you do with that? What can you create with that? I won’t give you anything else. She treaded water, the pain growing in her limbs, her body so cold she feared she wouldn’t be able to make it back to the shore.
The rain continued to pound against the lake, making any small sources of light puddle and jump. Nothing would happen. She would swim back, warm herself in a hot shower, and then slip into bed with Jonathan, hoping that he had not noticed her absence. She wouldn’t tell him what she had done; she had already decided that as she turned back to the shore and began to paddle back. Not unless he caught her coming in or had been awake and waiting, worried. She’d figure out then what to say, if it came to that. If he was asleep, then she’d explain the mud by saying that she’d had to go out and take a walk. She’d say that she couldn’t sleep, which was understandable enough and part of the truth.