The Night Swimmers

by Peter Rock

  I stopped once, treading water, and looked back. The lights in the houses were tiny, faint, the bluff hard to distinguish from the water, the beach impossible to see.

  “What’s the matter?” she said, closer than I’d expected.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  When she turned, her foot gently kicked, brushed my ribs, and then we were heading out further, deeper. On the horizon I could see the lights of distant boats, most likely freighters heading toward the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We found our rhythm again, the slight chill of the water receding with the effort. The blackness below, the darkness above, the way they blended together and time stretched. I could not keep count of my strokes.

  And then Mrs. Abel was no longer there, to my right, and I stopped, and spun, trying to find her. The stars, the horizon, lights that could be boats or more stars. As I tried to calm myself, I finally heard her calling my name, from somewhere behind me. I swam in that direction, and then I saw her silhouette dark against the horizon. It was as if she were standing on the lake’s surface.

  She wasn’t treading water; she was standing, stretching her arms across her chest to loosen her shoulders. She dropped her arms, put her hands on her hips. As I drew closer, I could see that the water around her was darker, moving in riffles.

  “What’s happening?” I said.

  “A shoal,” she said, the water reaching almost to her knees.

  Carefully I stretched my feet into the darkness beneath me. At first, nothing, then a smooth, slanted piece of stone.

  “I never knew,” she said, “but I’m not exactly sure where we are, either.”

  Beyond her, I could barely make out faint, scattered lights on the shoreline. Was it our shoreline? It was impossible to tell the lights apart from the stars.

  “How big is this?” she said.

  We shuffled along the shoal, from one stone to the next. After a few minutes, I slipped off the edge, into deeper water, and I turned back, keeping Mrs. Abel in sight, moving closer to her again. My feet were scratched, half-numb; I shivered. I kept crossing the shoal, finding its edges. It was long and thin, perhaps sixty feet long and ten feet across.

  Behind me, I heard Mrs. Abel begin to say something, but when I turned I could not see her. I held still, turned slowly, called her name.

  I called her name again and again, and she did not answer.

  Slowly, I moved along the shoal, down its length, and could not find her. I squinted into the darkness in every direction and I felt the pressure of the darkness pushing back, closing down around me so that it became difficult to breathe, to call, to shout.

  How much time passed?

  I shivered, I shouted, I searched, I called.

  The edge of the horizon began to lighten, to glow. My teeth chattered. My hands, my feet were numb; I couldn’t feel the stones beneath me, yet still I was standing. The cold of the water had returned, intensified, sharp against the edges of my skin and sinking deeper into my body.

  I stepped off the edge, plunged down, surfaced gasping. And then when I turned back to the shoal, to put my feet down again, I could not find it.

  I splashed, I circled. I stretched my feet into nothing, I dove deep, I floated on my back to rest, still shivering as the water tightened colder and colder, thick around me.

  I had lost the shoal; I had lost her, or she had lost me.

  Guessing at the direction, I finally set out alone, trying to kick blood into my feet, slapping my hands. I couldn’t feel my fingers, couldn’t hold them together. I swam, raking at the water, in the direction of and losing sight of lights on shore. For a time I swam on my back, trying to navigate by the stars above, to stay in alignment with them though I knew they were also moving with the rotation of the earth.

  I didn’t recognize the shoreline as I approached it, didn’t know where I was until I was ashore. It was dawn, almost dawn. I crawled onto the beach, spread out flat on the stones with my feet still in the water. At first I didn’t recognize the sound all around me was my own sobbing.

  I lifted my head, looked around myself. I was halfway between Little Sister Bay and the end of our road, a stretch where the bluff was close to the lake; there was no through road, but there were a few houses, lights switching on against the morning.

  I crawled up under the trees, unable to feel my hands, my feet, my face numb so that if there were tears on it I couldn’t feel them.

  I was stumbling naked through the woods. A dog barked. Darkness was receding, all around me. I veered in another direction. At a clothesline I stole a towel, cool and soft and smelling of detergent, and wrapped it around myself as I ran. The towel was bright red; I threw it down. Another house, its windows dark, another clothesline. A green sweatshirt, a pair of plaid shorts. My feet were thawing, beginning to hurt, all scratched up and bleeding.

  Someone shouted behind me, but the voice faded. There were no more dogs barking.

  I came to the path at the end of our road, and so I arrived at Mrs. Abel’s cabin.

  Inside, I said her name, I ran into the kitchen, back to climb the ladder to the loft, to look into that empty space.

  She wasn’t there. She hadn’t returned.

  Should I have called someone? Was I thinking that I should have called someone? I don’t know. She had no phone.

  I was thirsty, weak. I drank glass after glass of water, ate most of a box of saltine crackers, half a jar of peanut butter; that was all the food I could find.

  Climbing halfway to the loft, I reached up and pulled a blanket loose. I twisted it around myself. I stretched out on the couch and waited for her return.

  My muscles twitched, my legs kicking and arms jerking slightly beneath the blanket. My feet and hands, my fingers ached. All across the floor of her cabin were my bloody footprints—running back and forth, searching.

  When I awakened, I was swimming. I thrashed against the blanket, kicked myself free. I’d fallen off the couch, and bright light reflected through the window, off the lake. I stood, stretched, checked the loft once more.

  Carefully I made my way along the path through the woods, back to the Red Cabin. There I took off my stolen sweatshirt and shorts and changed into a T-shirt and trunks, a pair of sandals. Then I headed down toward the lake.

  My mother waved from the kitchen window, where she was washing dishes at the sink; she shouted something, some form of question. I just waved back, pointed toward the beach, and kept moving.

  The towel and clothes I’d left behind the night before, before I’d swum down the shore to meet Mrs. Abel, were still on our pier. I gathered them up, threw them into our aluminum canoe, and then dragged the canoe down along the stones, into the lake.

  I paddled out of the shallows, past the raft, out into the deeper water where I could no longer see the bottom; straight out from shore, not really thinking, squinting against the brightness. The water was calm, the surface of the lake barely rippled; it was a still day, and hot. Ahead of me, the water shimmered; light rose and spun and dissipated.

  If she were out here, I knew, I had almost no hope of finding her. I simply didn’t know what else to do except to paddle, to listen to the lap of the water against the canoe’s metal sides. My arms and legs, my face was hot with sunburn, my muscles sore from the night before, my throat parched.

  At last I turned around, back toward the familiar shoreline that hung suspended over the horizon, thick and dark; closer in, the white face of the bluff showed itself, and then the trees separated, their trunks and the shadows beneath them. At last even those shadows thinned, as I came in closer, so I could see up under the trees, the bright shapes of children playing in the woods.

  Mrs. Abel’s cabin looked empty—I’d been asleep, there, only hours before—and the windows glinted, reflecting back at me. Her white towel lay on the pier, left behind. I retrieved my Speedo, hooked through one leg to a post, a
nd dropped it in the bottom of the canoe with my other things; I waited for a moment, in case she’d come out of her house or call out to me. Then I checked behind myself, shivering, as if she might suddenly surface and ask me why I’d left her.

  That afternoon, I patrolled up and down the shoreline in the canoe, staring through the clear water. I saw smallmouth bass; perch with their striped sides; a school of thick carp. I saw white stones, stones skipped or thrown from the beach that would eventually be as green as those around them. I saw a lost anchor, shaped like a mushroom, rusting and trailing a shred of line.

  People, neighbors waved to me from their piers, swimmers called from the raft. Probably they thought I was fishing; one pole had been left in the canoe, its white tip slanting upward. An old Zebco 202 combo, with a silver-and-blue Lil Cleo on the end of its line, that spoon swinging back and forth above the water, reflecting in it. I didn’t lower it into the water, didn’t cast or troll, half afraid of what I might snag.

  - 19 -

  Two days passed, and the following night was my father’s birthday party, after which I believe we went to see City Slickers II and Speed at the Skylight Drive-In. I have no recollection of those movies—I was thinking of Mrs. Abel, worried, wondering what had happened, what I could have done, what I might say, why I wasn’t saying anything. (Was it that I was afraid of being found out? If so, what would even be found out? Was it that it was a secret? How would I explain what we’d been doing, or describe our relationship, when I didn’t really understand it myself? We had swum together, I could say. At night.) I also began to realize that anything I would say would be too late to help. Whatever had happened to Mrs. Abel could not be undone. I also realized that no one had missed her. Other than me, no one was used to seeing her with any regularity. Her disappearance simply wasn’t noticed.

  I stayed away from the lake, those days. I didn’t swim at all. A few times, I checked her empty house. Mostly, though, I tried to forget what had happened, to distract myself; I tried to turn that summer into past summers, to return to my old activities, my old friends.

  This wasn’t easy, because by that point most of my childhood summer friends had actual jobs—in Milwaukee or Chicago or even farther away—and came up the peninsula on rare weekends, if at all. I was left to consort with the younger siblings of my friends, the little brothers and sisters. At first they were excited, honored to go out with me, but after a few nights they all knew and felt, as I did, that the arrangement was slightly pathetic. Still, it helped me to forget, for moments, as I traveled back and forth to the AC Tap, out on Highway 57, drinking Pabst and eating pickled eggs, turkey gizzards. We tossed the beanbags, played “There’s a Tear in My Beer” on the jukebox, all the things I’d done a thousand times before.

  One of these nights, after last call at the Tap, I passed on an opportunity to skinny-dip with the others, down off the dock in Ephraim. I let them drop me at the top of our road, so the sound of tires on our gravel driveway wouldn’t awaken my parents.

  I walked slowly through the moonlit shadows to the Red Cabin, where I opened the door slowly, to quiet the spring, and switched on the light. The first thing I saw, twisted in the corner, on the floor, were the clothes I’d stolen from the clotheslines. They’d been there for days, yet suddenly they struck me like an accusation, a kind of link or evidence that should not be discovered. I picked up the green sweatshirt, the khaki shorts, then found the shirt and pants—Mr. Abel’s, that she’d given me—and went back out into the night, under the dark trees.

  I considered burying all the clothes, but I had no shovel; I began to climb a tree, but that also seemed a poor solution. Should I pile stones on top of them? Burn them? I kept walking, past the graves of our dogs Toto Tulip and Daisy Grace, then onto the road and up the slanted path along the cliff, past Mr. Zahn’s empty house.

  When I reached the boat beneath the trees, I climbed up, crawled deep inside the hold where once the nets had been folded and stored. The bent wood inside the hull was smooth and cool, familiar as the faint smell of diesel, the fishiness emanating from the hull, the dampness of the lake in the past and the forest all around. I pulled the rickety hatch over the opening, closing out the stars; I curled up with the clothes beneath my head and rested there half-asleep, hardly thinking.

  Eventually I was startled by branches scratching the boat’s side, by the wind high above. A storm was rising. I climbed out of the hold, over the edge, leaving the clothing behind, and as I stumbled down the path the sound of waves echoed around me, all along the cliff.

  At the Red Cabin, when I touched the door, a round strip of paper fell from the doorknob. It was actually a piece of birch bark (one that I still have—flattened, taped into a notebook). Inside, I switched on the light and read what had been scratched there:

  That night the wind was blowing so hard that sticks rained down from the trees and fell around me as I made my way along the path. I could see the candlelight flickering in the windows of Mrs. Abel’s cabin, but it wasn’t until I was close that I heard the piano, struggling to be heard in its conversation with the storm. Rising, swelling, receding again; the melody disappeared and then returned, coming like the black line of a gust traveling across the surface of the water.

  I opened the door, stepped into the room, the music so much louder, inside. She didn’t hear, didn’t notice me as I stood behind her. Her hair was loose, snarled around her head, her hands sharp, her bent fingers on the keys. When she finally heard me, she stood and turned; the long sleeves of the oxford shirt she wore, their cuffs unbuttoned, made it seem as if she had no hands.

  “I thought you were with me,” she said. “I didn’t see you, didn’t feel you.”

  “I was,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “You didn’t go where I went.”

  She spoke so fast it was hard to understand her. Her eyes wide, she swayed slightly, on her bare feet, as if attuned to the storm.

  “I swam back,” I said. “I looked, I waited as long as I could.”

  “It didn’t happen to you? You didn’t go under?”

  She glanced away, toward the window; the waves were crashing, spraying across the end of her pier. And then she reached out, her hand appearing suddenly from the cuff of her shirt, and touched the side of my face. Her fingertips were rough and cold. She held her hand there for a moment and then took it away.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  She stood there shivering, her arms wrapped around herself until I climbed halfway up the ladder to the loft and pulled a blanket loose. I put it over her shoulders, helped her sit down on the couch.

  “I was down below and there was no way back,” she said. “It happened so fast. Sit down! What are you doing, standing there looking at me?”

  I sat on the couch beside her; her trembling radiated along my left side. The room around us was the same as ever: the colored beach glass, gently rattling against the window; the piano and Mr. Zahn’s table with the carved lions; the wooden bluebird perched on the wooden plane; the picture of the cabin and the forest fire, nailed to the wall.

  “What day is it?” she said.

  “Tuesday,” I said. “Wednesday.”

  I had no idea what time it was. Somewhere between midnight and morning.

  “Where was I?” She spoke this question as if she shared it, as if she wasn’t only repeating what I’d asked. She turned her head quickly, glancing around the room. “I’m trying to say. I just made it back. It’s impossible. I can’t—” Her voice trailed off.

  The cabin creaked around us, trying to hold itself against the wind.

  “I was alone out there,” I said. “I didn’t know what to do. I searched as long as I could.”

  Without warning, she stood, crossed the room and opened the door, stumbling out into the darkness, the door slapping the wall outside again and again.

  I leapt after her—across the gravel dri
veway, under the trees, their branches thrown all around in the storm—and caught her by the arm, slowed her down.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know!” She was shouting, tilting her face close to my ear, her hair against my cheek. “I’m trying to tell you what happened. A fish, a blue fish flew past me, it was a bird in the water. I don’t know!”

  Finally I got her back to the cabin, the door closed against the wind. Then I had to go out and retrieve the blanket that she’d dropped on the driveway; when I returned, she was stretched out on the couch with her eyes closed. I spread the blanket over her; I looked down into her face, and she seemed older than she had before. And then her eyes suddenly opened, gazing up at me.

  “I’m leaving soon,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “In a few days. Maybe sooner?”

  Her eyes closed again, and there was only the sound of the waves, the candles flickering in the draft. Her chest rose and fell, a slow rhythm; I believed she’d fallen asleep when suddenly she spoke again.

  “I was hardly awake,” she said, “but I wasn’t asleep. I felt myself as a girl, walking along a path in the forest. I could hear the water nearby, but I couldn’t see it; I felt myself in other times, other places, as if I were there. The bluebird swam into my hand and lay still, then flew away again.”