Echo Lake: A Novel (35 page)

As she paddled back, imagining she could almost see the outlines of her jacket in the tree, the water began to move. Waves rolled around her, ducking her under and bobbing her back up again like a cork. She spit lake water from her mouth (it tasted like mud and grass and something metallic) and prepared for the next wave, jumping up with it. She could not touch the ground with her feet, though she had swam back toward what she believed was the shore (had she turned herself around? Was she paddling back out into the middle of the lake? It didn’t seem so—the lights from the town were behind her).

The water was rising. It pushed her back as it rose.

She was a strong swimmer, but her teeth chattered, her arms felt burdened with weights. She kept swimming, fighting the push of the waves and the rising water.

Something from below the surface of the water rammed up against her leg, bruising it and stunning her so badly that she stopped swimming and dropped below the surface. The object, large and block-like, rose up, pushing her out of the way. She spluttered up, clawing, her arms and legs burning with the effort.

•

Levi swam quickly towards the heart of the lake, as far from the share as he could stand until his arms ached and he had to stop. He bobbed there, his feet far from the ground,

This seemed like as good a place as any. Levi held his breath and dunked his head. He dove downward, swimming hard to get himself so far down that he could not possibly make it back up in enough time. He meant to swim to the bottom, close enough to touch it, and then let go. He knew his body would fight him, would make him tear to the surface. He deserved that suffering. He only hoped he could resist his body’s desire to live.

He had not gone far before the object rammed into his side, stopping his descent. Panicked, he fought his way back up, his side aching. He broke the surface of the water and saw, in the moonlight, that the lake was moving. It looked, too, like it was filled with bobbing objects. Coffins. The graveyard had come up again, as it had forty years before.

About fifty feet away, something struggled against one of the coffins. The water sprayed and a hand popped up momentarily before it fell back down into the water again.

Levi didn’t think; he swam toward the person. He knew what drowning looked like, that desperate attempt to stay above water, the arms reaching up, trying to get enough leverage. Drowning people do not usually shout; they are too busy trying to stay alive. He reached the coffin and grabbed the flailing arm, hauling the person up and onto the coffin, which floated easily.

It was a woman, her hair plastered against her head. She was in her bra. Her skin was cold to the touch, her teeth chattering so hard that she could not speak.

Hold onto this, he said, throwing her arms onto the coffin. I’m going to go on the other side and balance, he said. We’ll make it to the shore that way.

I don’t know where the shore is, she said. The shore’s flooded.

We’ll make it far enough to stand, he said, and find
your clothes.

He recognized Emily’s voice.

•

The sky was slowly transitioning from black to gray—she could see the outline of trees and objects now, and the horizon over the lights of the town grew a murky orange. It must have been around five thirty in the morning. She held onto the piece of wood, one arm slung over it, and padded to the shore, where she could see her flashlight glinting in the pocket of her jacket.

Across from her, Levi kicked, propelling them forward. She was too cold to kick much, but she tried, though she could not feel her legs. She shivered uncontrollably, now too cold to speak. She wondered why Levi was out here—had he been following her? Did he mean to do her some harm? She didn’t think so; why would he have saved her, then?

When they reached the shore, the water was knee-deep. Levi helped Emily down from the coffin and into the woods, where she had hung her clothes on a branch. They were damp, but better than nothing, and Levi helped her into them. His own clothes were somewhere else, probably spread across the water by now. He put the jacket over her head and helped her navigate her arms and head through the holes.

Are you OK? He asked? Do you need to see the doctor?

Emily shook her head. I don’t think I was out here too long, she said. She was deeply tired. She simply wanted to go home and get into bed.

Levi nodded.

Why were you out here? She asked. They were making their way back to her house, where she said she could find him clothes. He was naked, but not shivering. She noticed, in the dim morning light (the sun had almost broken over the horizon) that he was covered in scratches. He held his right hand against his left elbow, pressing it to his body.

He shrugged. I guess I wanted to make my peace with
this place.

She nodded. Me too.

They walked silently for a while.

I tried to die, Levi said, breaking the silence. I was trying to punish myself for what happened to your aunt. I wasn’t brave enough to just turn myself in. I wanted the easy way out. But you were out there, too, and my plan didn’t work.

Emily hugged her arms close to her body. It was too cold to think clearly. She heard Levi as though from a distance. She struggled to listen, to answer in a way that would be helpful to him.

You shouldn’t turn yourself in, she said. You shouldn’t do it.

I have to, he said. I told people I wanted change. I wanted justice. I can’t only want justice when it’s convenient for me.

She shook her head. This is different. She didn’t know how. She only knew that she didn’t want him in prison. What purpose would it serve? What justice would it deliver? Frannie would still be dead. The town would lose him. He would lose everything.

They approached the backyard. Emily felt a great relief at seeing the house, her back window lit from the light she had left on. She had never felt so much relief and happiness at coming home before.

I’ll bring you something to wear, she said, slipping inside. She tiptoed into the bedroom, where Jonathan was snoring, sleeping heavily. She brought out a pair of pants, flip-flops, and an oversized sweatshirt.

I’m not sure if these fit, she said, but it’s the best I could do.

Levi pulled the clothes on, grateful to no longer be naked in front of Emily. As soon as he was clothed, he realized how cold he had been. But the air was already warming with the sun, and it would reach almost 90 degrees by noon.

Don’t do it, she said. Don’t confess. It won’t do any good, not now.

I don’t know what I’m going to do, he said. But I’m done here. It’s over for me.

Emily nodded. She wanted to stay here, to give him some words of comfort, to hug him, even, but she was too cold and too tired.

Goodbye, she said. And thank you for tonight.

He nodded. I’m grateful I was there.

He walked away, the plastic bottoms of his flip flops slapping against his feet. She never saw him again.

10

That morning, the sun emerged and the clouds cleared by eight AM. People tried to get to work, placing planks of wood across the mud puddles for the cars to slog through, though most called in—those whose phone lines still worked. Many met the sound of static when they placed the phone against their ears.

Word spread about the coffins. Some had washed up intact, just worn boxes, the hinges rusted closed. Some had washed up and rammed against the trees, busting open from the impact, and the dressed bones lay now in the mud in their silks and necklaces and ropes of long hair. Others had washed up on the road out of Heartshorne, spilling their contents onto the major road to Keno.

Other things had washed up, too—pieces of cars, shopping carts, years of garbage, and chunks of the waterlogged trees that broke apart from the surge of water. The county men came out to clear the road to Keno, while others took the back roads around the perimeter of the lake, which, though still high, had retracted from its nighttime levels. It was calm now, and few had seen the roiling and how the water had insisted its way over its usual edges.

The county men found the children early, as they were clearing the road that ran adjacent to the bait shop. Fishing line was wound around the children’s hands and throats. They wore the clothes they had been lost in. The girl still had a purple plastic barrette in the remnants of her hair.

The man who found them covered them with his jacket and wouldn’t let the others near them.

Stay away, he said, his voice gone soft and hard to decipher. They’re sleeping.

This is what his co-workers heard, and afraid (they had a brief glance at the bodies before he had covered them, the color of the skin and the shapes of them familiar enough that they understood what they were, if not yet exactly who), they tried to talk him away from the children.

John, one of his friends on the crew, Martin, said, stepping forward. We’ve got to call this in. We aren’t supposed to touch people who…people who wash up like this. Martin’s mind flashed to a police procedural show that he watched every Tuesday night, one in which bodies were only coded information, nothing more. If he could put himself in that mind, like the police on those shows who walked around bodies placed on steel slabs, their heels clicking, he could help. He could lure John away and cover them up.

We aren’t supposed to disturb the scene of a crime, he said. We might contaminate the evidence.

Shh, John said. Don’t wake them up with that kind of language.

John had expected only to clear away the slimy boughs and branches tangled with plastic Wal-Mart bags. He had not expected the children, the Harris twins, though earlier that month he’d been on a search party to find them. During the search party, a slog through the muddy woods around the lake, he had not expected to find them. Then, he’d imagined they’d been kidnapped, taken by some angry relative or even a stranger. Somewhere distant in his mind he understood that they could have been killed, but that thought had been so far away, so farfetched, that he had never seriously considered it. They had disappeared miles away, almost in Keno. They had not, he knew, searched as thoroughly as they should have.

The only dead person he had ever seen was his grandmother, who had died when he was a child. He remembered her in the coffin, powdered and in a dress she’d only worn to marriages and graduations, her skin cold and her wrinkles hardened (according to his sister, who had bent down to kiss her on the hand—he had not had the guts to touch her). Since then, he’d been lucky—everyone in his family that he cared about or knew still alive, his job at worst showing him only a dog with its insides spilling out of its body on the road or dead birds, piles of feather and bone with pink, almost pretty entrails.

This was more than what he could understand. He liked children. His girlfriend wanted children, though he had urged her to wait and insisted on condoms, though she didn’t want to use them.

It can’t hurt to skip it just this one time, she’d say, though they both knew this to be untrue. How many babies had their friends brought into the world that way? He’d insist, though, citing his shit job, her desire to go to beauty school.

We can’t afford a baby, he’d say, and he meant it. He just wanted to be ready. He wanted to buy his future children good swing sets, the kind you had to set into the ground with a cone of concrete, and he wanted to put them in clothes that would not shame them (he remembered a rare unpleasant occurrence from his childhood, when he had been called a white trash for wearing a jacket with a rip in the armpit and paint stain across the chest).

Seeing the children made something inside of him dislocate. He had believed in the goodness of the world, in children playing outdoors without parental supervision, in sunny days at lakes and drinking beer in the afternoon while you watch the children catch lightning bugs in jelly-jars. For most people, these things were no longer real or possible, but they were real for him here in Heartshorne. He loved living here, far away from places that made him nervous, like malls with expensive clothing stores, the mannequins headless and wearing asymmetrical pieces of fabric, restaurants with live music, and hushed museums filled with art that seemed, to him, like ugly affronts to everything that was simple and good. He had believed without irony that Heartshorne was the best possible place to be born in and the best place to grow up. The children here on the ground, the blue-blotching and brokenness of their skin, their arms and legs bound, their bodies swollen—this was not something he could understand. It was cold. They should be covered. This had been his first, stupid, thought—he had to cover them to keep them warm, though by the looks of the bodies they had not been warm in a very long time. He put his coat over them anyway.

He could not leave their side. What if they woke up, afraid, and did not know where they were?

They’re sleeping, he said, and then again
they’re sleeping
, believing suddenly that yes, this was possible. He could press his mouth to their mouths. He could make them alive again. Martin pulled him away as he began to cry, something he had not done since he was ten, since his grandmother’s funeral. The men, knowing how much it took to cry in front of other men, looked away from him.