Beneath the Lake

by Christopher Ransom

  This morning, their first at Lake Blundstone, is no different. Ray wakes before the sun, which seems miraculous given the ordeal that was yesterday. More than twelve hours in the truck for a trip that should have taken only seven. The stress of being dislocated and lost. The multiple scares and strange sightings since arriving, culminating in the confrontation with the armed madman who turned out to be his brother. And finally, permeating every waking moment since she agreed to join him on the trip, the idea and presence of Megan.

  The hope and excitement and wanting to be at your best that comes with spending so much time with someone you barely know and are attracted to. It’s exhausting. So much pent-up emotion, a fraction of which was expended in a sexual encounter that Ray cannot, in his first waking moments, find a label for. Whatever it was, he does not consider it a one-night stand, nor the kind of earned true love they fictionalized in the Bronco. He has no reference point for what transpired between them. The closest he can come to framing it is as a much needed release between two people who had been circling one another long enough to feel safe.

  The tent is still dark. He rolls over, his body stiff, intending to wrap his arm around her, not to wake her but only to let her know he is here. He reaches, his shoulder sliding on the choice cotton sheet, and he is greeted by a mattress vacancy.

  Where could she have gone? And why, at four or five in the morning?

  He steps into his leather sandals by feel. Her running shoes, the purple Nikes she changed into when they reached the beach, are no longer beside them. She probably slipped out to pee. And yet he can’t help feeling something is wrong.

  Leonard? Ray wouldn’t put it past his deranged older brother to find a way to lure her back down to the beach. If not explicitly to seduce her, a ruse Ray cannot imagine her falling for, especially after what they just shared, then possibly out of sheer loneliness, wanting someone to regale with his bullshit stories of danger sought and death narrowly escaped. Leonard is a lonely man, now more than ever.

  So many weddings and holidays past, Leonard would show up with a new girlfriend (or fiancée or wife), the young lady more often than not harboring an abusive past and purportedly thriving in her current exotic career (stripping, importing ‘medicinal’ marijuana, tattooing D-list celebrities, etc.). But he hadn’t brought one on this trip, and in his stag attendance Leonard would require careful observation. I don’t drink anymore, Ray can hear his brother whispering as he leads Megan down the path, back to his obscene tent, but this is a special occasion. I’ll have a sip or two while you tell me how you found yourself tagging along with my brother. He’s weak, you know, which can be endearing, for a little while.

  Ray is outside now, circling the tent, their camp site, and the cooler pre-dawn air and dark shapes of the trees and brush only sharpen his concern. Maybe it wasn’t Leonard at all. Maybe she ventured out to pee or take a walk and some other kind of trouble found her. Maybe, and this could happen very easily, she got lost.

  ‘Megan,’ Ray calls out in a heavy whisper. But why is he whispering? His parents are sleeping inside the Airstream, which is parked at least a hundred steps away. They won’t hear him. ‘Megan,’ he calls again, in a speaking voice that seems both inadequate and too loud. ‘Megan.’

  He forgot to bring a flashlight but is already nearing the larger camp site, where the hind end of Colt’s Audi sits orb-like and dusty on the edge of his path, and his eyes are adjusting to the retreating darkness, the sky a moonless and misty indigo above and a lighter shade of denim far to the east. He studies the sand for footprints, and there are plenty, but he has no way of knowing if they are from last night or more recently, or if they are even hers.

  He gets lost in the maze of weeds and finds himself at the base of the deep brown cliff, turns back, and a short minute or two later emerges out onto the beach proper. A hundred yards or so to his left stand Leonard’s tent, the white truck and the Bronco. The other direction is a dark plane of sand sloping directly to the water.

  This is strange enough to stop Ray in his tracks. He could swear that the water line had been, as of four hours ago, at least half a mile from their camp site. They’d driven a good distance before running into Leonard, hadn’t they? At least two miles up the shore and another half-mile inland.

  But here it is, the black surface with the first gloss of morning light, and, though he can barely feel the delicate breeze on his bare arms and chest, Ray can see the tiny jewel-like ripples of the water only a short walk from where he stands.

  We got disoriented, he thinks. The beach might extend half a mile or more in some places, but there could very easily be inlets and nodes reaching much farther up. This is logical, but something deeper inside him feels threatened.

  Don’t be stupid, Ray can hear Leonard saying, in his boyhood voice. It’s only water. And sand, and a few fishy things clinging to their habitat.

  Ray is about to head toward Leonard’s own bizarre stunt of a habitat when something down by the water glimmers, fetching his gaze, halting his feet in the sand. Something moved, didn’t it? Something silvery, upright, like a piece of the moonlight that walked on water, onto the shore. One moment it is thin as the edge of a glass pane, the next fuller, like a person but not a person. And people are not phosphorescent. They do not twinkle.

  He remembers Megan’s description from last night. Faces. A row of them, white bodies standing on the shore, turning to stare at her when the flashlight caught their attention. He thought she was seeing things, until the black sheet raced over the Bronco.

  Ray shivers, glad he does not have the flashlight now. He doesn’t want to give the thing – it’s standing in the same spot, fading and brightening, twisting back and forth – any reason to focus on him. He is exposed on the beach.

  Where’s Megan? She could be back in the tent by now. Does he really want to be out here alone with whatever that is? No.

  Then, as he is about to return to the tent, and thinking of Megan, he realizes it’s her, the thing down by the water. It’s not silver at all, he sees now. It’s Megan, waving a flashlight overhead, signaling him. He knows her shape, her hair, both of which he can see more clearly now with the flashlight, which she must be aiming at herself. He is already walking toward her, immensely relieved.

  He walks faster, the sand tugging at his sandals, making his calf muscles work. She lowers the flashlight. Good. She knows he has seen her and is on his way. What brought her down here? He doesn’t see anything else. No Leonard. No boat. She is in a windbreaker and her shorts from yesterday, the flashlight hanging at her side.

  She must have gone for a walk. Needed a little space. No big deal.

  He loses a sandal, stops, and toes around in the sand trying to slip it back on. He can’t get the angle right, has to bend over to replace it with one hand. When he looks up again Megan’s back is turned. She is facing the water, which is no longer rippled but perfectly smooth, the top of a gigantic onyx dinner table.

  ‘Hey, what’d you find?’ he says, ten paces away. ‘I was worried about you.’

  ‘Go for a swim,’ she says in a dull voice, not turning to greet him. ‘But couldn’t without you.’

  ‘Aw, that’s sweet. You waited.’

  Megan stares at the water, standing perfectly still, her hair down around her shoulders, shading her left ear and the side of her face. Something about her pose, the absolute stillness of her slightly slumped posture, halts him within arm’s reach.

  ‘Megan? You okay?’

  She doesn’t respond, but the pitch of her voice just a moment ago still isn’t sitting right with him. It was too flat. Older. The outdoors, the lake, everything around them has fallen into absolute silence.

  ‘Hey, what’s wrong?’

  Her shoulders lift, she almost turns, seems to want to… but something won’t let her, and her shoulders fall again. She is still staring at the water, the black black water inches from her feet, and the surface has gone to a kind of darkness Ray has never seen, the black
ness of deprivation chambers, total absence. The abyss.

  He reaches forward and touches her shoulder through the fabric of her windbreaker. The thin nylon is wet, soaked. How did he not see this before? Her flesh beneath the cloth is cold, too full, her frame all wrong.

  She turns, not Megan.

  It is a woman he has not seen in thirty years. The mother who was pulled under in the storm. Her face is swollen white, her slashed cheeks cleansed of blood, revealing planes of bone. The emotion in her dark eyes under the limp strands of her wet hair is not anger or accusation. It is pain, pure pain, the deepest sadness Ray has ever witnessed.

  She embraces him and he can’t move, even after her cold body presses in, the rotten lake water of her tomb leeching into his clothes, taking him the way it took her. He has no emotion, there is no room for any other inside her shroud. She pours her grief into him with the abundance of time, all the time she has been waiting for someone to share it with her.

  He lets her, knowing he never really had a choice, and the black water rises around their legs, over the beach, filling itself anew on her bottomless misery.

  Brunch Is Served

  Ray awakens gradually, warmed and then far too hot as the golden shaft of morning sun inches across the tent, over his sweat-soaked shirt, up the side of his face. He doesn’t recognize the stand beside the bed at first, the shimmering fabric wall. Where he went to sleep. Oh, right. Long drive. Leonard with his gun and various mental illnesses. Megan’s hips… the rest is a blur. Ray sits up, too fogged and derailed to realize this is the first time since childhood he managed to sleep past sunrise on a vacation.

  Megan.

  He stands too quickly, has to steady himself using the bamboo hamper as he attempts to push his sand-crusted feet into his sandals. Gotta find her. She could have been missing for hours. The leather footbeds are wet, cool. Darker than usual. Water marks across the bamboo floor. Water from…

  Ray withdraws his foot and steps away from his sandals. He begins to shiver, pulling at his T-shirt. It’s not sweaty. It’s soaked, his shorts too, as if he fell into a swimming pool with all his clothes on.

  – her swollen white face, her slashed cheeks cleansed of blood, revealing planes of bone. The emotion in her dark eyes under the limp strands of –

  Ray peels his shirt overhead, kicks off his shorts, wadding the wet mass into a ball before throwing it out the front of the tent. It’s on him, the lake water, he can smell it. He turns in a panic, wanting to run to the shower, but there is no shower, they are camping. The only way to bathe out here is in the lake.

  Ray hurries outside and takes two bottles of water from the cooler, upending one over the top of his head, wiping his chest and arms and legs as it pours down, then douses himself with the other.

  Back in the tent, he throws on a dry shirt and shorts, then plucks the lake-soaked set as well as the gritty sandals from the floor, carrying them out like a maid who’s found a dead mouse in the pantry. He circles the camp site, looking for a good place to hide them so he won’t have to explain them. By the time he reaches the brush at the back of the clearing, he decides that even if he his father somehow managed to tow out a dual-load Samsung washing machine this year, he’s done with these clothes. They have been soiled by… whatever happened before dawn.

  Ray lobs the clothes out into the wild grass, then flings the sandals boomerang-style as far away from camp as they will go. Another pair lost to this bitch sand. Like his old green Incredible Hulk flip-flops; now those were cool. He wonders what happened to them after that summer… maybe they’re still buried up on the point.

  Megan.

  He runs for camp.

  It’s not far enough to justify the exertion, but by the time Ray blunders into the center of Mercer Base Camp he is dizzy, heart banging, looking like a man who’s spent the night in a sweat lodge. He rounds the last crop of bushes in front of the gleaming Airstream and all but slams into the extended picnic table before plowing to a halt.

  An enormous breakfast buffet has been laid out on the red-checkered cloth, with steaming crocks of scrambled eggs, sausages and bacon, piles of pancakes, overflowing bowls of fruit, trays of muffins and bagels, chilled lox and two buckets of ice – one for the orange juice, another for the champagne.

  The gathering of sunglasses and blank faces turn to him in unison, the conversation shutting off so abruptly, Ray is sure they were talking about him and are now wondering who invited him.

  Warren is at the head of the table, wearing a green velour tracksuit with white stripes, the Florida retiree as a manager of hip-hop artists. Francine is in a wheelchair, mummified in a batik beach wrap whose bright colors only make her gray hair and pale skin seem more severe. Leonard is a bloodshot egg in his snug Coors beer shirt and safari hat. It is difficult to focus on Colette – her once radiant blonde hair gone to a dull shade of brown and cropped to her ears, a weathered flannel shirt of blue plaid far too loose over her bony frame – but mostly because she is holding a three- or four-year-old girl in her lap. Ray is so taken aback by the collective toll time has taken on everyone that a few more agonizing seconds pass before he is able to connect the pair of gold aviators and lips painted in umber to his missing traveler. Megan is wedged between the siblings, looking so relaxed she might have been a member of the family for years, veteran of half a dozen of these trips.

  ‘Good morning?’ Ray says.

  Everyone murmurs some form of reply, then his father is springing up from his chair and moving around the table like a man of fifty, not seventy-six, his skin tanned nut-brown, his bald head glowing with vigor. He takes Ray by the shoulders, appraising his youngest offspring.

  ‘Raymond. My boy. I’m very glad you were able to join us.’

  Before Ray can respond, his father embraces him, the lean arms filled with simian ferocity. This morning’s ‘excursion’ down to the black water, Megan’s awful transformation into the drowned mother, is forgotten as quickly as that. Ray is overcome by his father’s touch. He squeezes the old man in return, inhaling the familiar pepper and nautical rope cologne that has by now become a permanent natural scent.

  ‘Hey, Dad. Been a long time. You look good.’

  Warren steps back, chin jutting. He seems shorter, his power compacted. ‘I feel good. Ready to sail to La Costa Brava. You look… well, you’ve become a man. Gaspar tells me you’ve been through some turmoil back in Boulder but are still beating the market average. A well-deserved vacation, hmm? The Big Lake. Yes. Sit down, sit, sit! Can I get you a juice? Coffee?’

  ‘The Kona blend is really something,’ Colt says in her morning pharmaceutical drawl. ‘Come say hi to your niece, Uncle Ray. She’s been dying to meet you.’

  On his way, Ray leans over his mother, standing between the wheels of her chair dug into the sand. He runs his hands gently up and down her arms and kisses her cheek.

  ‘Morning, Mom. Some view, huh? I missed you.’

  Francine Mercer nods slowly and half of her mouth attempts to smile. One tremulous hand rises to pat his own. She’s had a stroke, or several of them, or has been invaded by Parkinson’s, or is just about dead. Ray doesn’t know which or what all, and isn’t about to ask now.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’

  She hums a little something and pats his hand again.

  ‘She already had her breakfast,’ Warren says. ‘Her appetite is formidable. Don’t you worry about this young lady, Raymond. She’ll outrun every John Deere in Nebraska.’

  ‘Morning, sleepyhead.’ Megan grins over her mimosa. ‘I told them it was my fault we got lost and were up half the night getting settled.’

  ‘Right. I guess you all met Megan,’ Ray says, wondering what she told them about their relationship status, worried all over again how he is supposed to maintain the cover story, if he should even bother. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t up earlier to introduce you.’