“Good.”
“Good?”
“I mean…like…of course he knows. Right?”
“Right. But he said he never goes out there. I didn’t tell him we did. I just told him it looked like there might be a third lake. He said it’s more of a swamp. Said it’s ugly.”
“Ugly,” Amelia repeated.
“What’s the scuba gear for?” Marcy asked, stepping out from behind register one.
“Never mind,” James said.
“Never mind,” Amelia said.
Marcy looked from one to the other.
“Are the two of you…weird or something?”
James smiled at Amelia and carried the gear back toward the glass front doors. Before exiting he stopped and turned to face her.
We’re doing this, he mouthed silently.
Amelia whispered, Yes.
“You guys are weird,” Marcy said.
Amelia’s smile fell slowly from her face as James exited. Not because she wasn’t happy. Not because she wasn’t excited that he’d gone out and gotten the suit. But because, already, the house seemed to require a more careful consideration than any simple smile could supply.
We’re doing this, yes, Amelia thought. But…what is it?
13
It wasn’t just the helmet and breathing tube that were gold; the whole suit shimmered.
That night they tried it on in James’s backyard. His parents were asleep inside and so they had to be quiet. They tried. But they laughed, stumbled, and felt like the first men on the moon. Acted like them, too, pretending to place flags on the moon’s surface, jamming actual sticks in the dirt. It was awkward, it was thrilling, it was frightening.
“One rule,” Amelia said as James removed the helmet, exposing his young face in the porch light surrounded by bugs.
“Only one?”
“No hows or whys.”
“What?”
“We don’t ask how the house ended up there and we don’t ask why it’s furnished. We don’t ask how or why it works.”
James understood.
“No hows or whys,” he agreed.
James stuck out one gold gloved mitt and Amelia, smiling, shook it.
With that contact, both felt the full thrilling power of their discovery.
A clubhouse. If they wanted it to be.
And it wasn’t just the house. No. It was the fourth lake they were swimming in, too.
For the first time in either of their lives, they were falling in love.
14
Alone underwater. Alone in the house.
Breathing.
Two minutes in, James felt his pulse quickening and thought he better get up to the surface before it was too late. But he was wearing the helmet and he didn’t need to go up like he’d had to two days ago. He could spend more than an hour down here if he wanted to.
The breathing tube led out the front door and up to the canoe. There it was connected to a compressor that Amelia watched when she wasn’t staring into the water, staring at the roof of the house.
James was no longer thinking about speedboats and screaming girls in bikinis. Amelia had to be impressed by all this.
You’re in a house underwater and all you can think about is Amelia.
It was true and so he laughed and the laughter splattered against the glass dome protecting him.
He stood in the foyer, shining the flashlight down the hall where Amelia had looked at herself in the mirror. He could see the glass of it, hanging on the left wall. And beyond it, a much larger room, the dimensions of which he could only begin to ascertain.
As he stepped toward it, the breathing tube snagged on the half front door and the tug was as slight as a tap on the shoulder.
The suit was bulky and the gloves made ape hands of his fingers and he couldn’t turn as quickly as he wanted to. He felt too slow and too blocky. With his free hand he gave the hose a twirl, sent a ripple through it, hoping it would come loose from whatever snag was stopping him from going farther into the house.
It worked.
Free, he looked into the mirror as he passed it, smiling behind the glass helmet.
It was the visage, James thought, of young love.
He saw a room ahead, piecemeal, made up of the brief patches of light he afforded it. It was a dining room. The table and chairs told him that. But nothing told him how the table and chairs remained fixed as they were to the floor.
Nor did anything explain the rug beneath the legs of the chairs. Or the hundreds of trinkets that lined the shelves of a glass cabinet against the right wall.
No hows, James thought. No whys.
It was impossible not to feel like he’d broken into this home. If not for the darkness, the distortion, and the cold, James would have counted himself lucky for not having run into whoever owned it.
He moon-stepped toward the dining room and got snagged again.
“Dammit.”
He turned and sent another ripple through the tube. It traveled the length of the hose, slow motion, vanishing through the dark rectangle of the half front door into the muddy front yard beyond.
Then, the ripple came back.
Toward him.
As if James were outside the house and the hose were here, snagged where he stood.
James trained the flashlight on the front door, tracing the rectangular door frame. Mud motes and minnows passed through his light, then vanished fast into the darkness.
He waited for a second tug from outside of the house. Another ripple.
You’re breathing too hard, man.
But that wasn’t possible. Unless someone sent it his way.
He thought of Amelia up top.
Had she sent him the wave in the breathing tube? She must have. But was she trying to tell him something?
Someone’s up there, he thought. Someone telling her to get her boyfriend out of the water and get home. NOW.
James lumbered back to the front door. Peering over the threshold, he saw that the tube was indeed snagged on one of the porch handrails.
He took the hose between a gloved finger and thumb.
Did you just call yourself her boyfriend?
The hose came loose from the handrail and James easily coiled the slack. He reentered the house.
He wanted to go deeper this time. Deeper into the house. Deeper into the lake.
Deeper in love.
Is this love? Is that happening?
He got to the dining room quickly, more agile than he was moments ago. And despite the darkness ahead, the darkness everywhere, he felt safe.
Alive.
He floated to the dining room table.
The flashlight showed him a tablecloth, serving dishes, folded napkins, and eight high-backed chairs. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, swaying gently with the unseen waves alive here at the bottom of the lake.
There were paintings on the walls. Landscapes that seemed to undulate, as if something lived beneath the yellow grass.
How?
Unlit candles. Sconces. Utensils. All of it sedentary on the table. On shelves. On plates.
How?
A solid wood buffet. A tray upon it. Not floating. Not moving at all.
HOW?
“No hows,” James said into the helmet. “No whys.”
Amelia was far above him. Watching the compressor.
James went deeper.
The hose followed smoothly. The hose did not get snagged.
And James went deeper into the house.
15
Past the dining room, a study. One wall lined with books.
Intact. Bound. Underwater.
Books.
James trained the flashlight on the titles. Foreign languages, or maybe the letters
had been ruined by water after all, stolen a piece at a time, the three lines that made up an A, the three of an F. By the bookshelf was a chair, solidly planted on the ground, beside it an end table with an ashtray, beyond it a bay window. By James’s light, the world outside the glass was pitch-black, yet he could see something out there. Seaweed waving at the base of the window, mud floating on submerged waves, the pulse of the lake.
James sat down in the study chair. Put his gloved hands on the armrests.
He noted the wallpaper, tiny ducks fleeing a shadow-faced hunter.
A stepladder to reach the higher books.
A second door, behind the study chair.
James grew colder. Physically, yes, but in a fearful way, too. Scary thought, himself seated in the study of an impossible home at the bottom of a lake. It suddenly felt possible, no, likely, that something dead could come floating through the door he’d entered by. Something falling to pieces, pulling apart, coming toward him, consciously or not, a drifting once-was, unglued.
He tried to pick up the ashtray on the end table. It wouldn’t move.
James stared at it for a long time, resisting the word why.
He got up and adjusted the tube’s slack, giving him another twenty feet of walking room.
Astronautlike, he rounded the chair and opened the second door. Because he didn’t have the flashlight lifted yet, wasn’t pointing it ahead, he saw nothing. In that moment, that single drumbeat of absolute darkness, he felt as if he were stepping into the nothingness of death, a real end, a place where he’d never be able to find Amelia, never find warmth, solace, confidence, triumph, reason, or love ever again.
Don’t enter this room.
A dark thought to have at a dark threshold.
But James entered the room.
He brought the flashlight up and yelled, two involuntary syllables crashing against the helmet’s glass.
A pale face in the flashlight. Staring into his eyes.
James stepped back, knocking his elbow against the wall.
But it was only a painting.
“Jesus,” James said. Then he laughed at himself. And he wished Amelia had been here to hear him scream.
Not a face. Not eyes after all. Two plums on a white table, the edge of the table like a perfectly set, unsmiling mouth.
A rippling still life beneath the (roof) waves.
James leaned toward the painting, bringing the helmet’s glass half an inch from the canvas. He thought it was an oil painting. He recalled the cliché like oil and water. He wondered if that had something to do with why it was still intact.
He shone the flashlight around the room, getting details the way he got anything in this house: in pieces. As if a puzzle had been dropped into the third lake many years ago, and now James and Amelia were here to put it back together again.
A brown leather couch. A long, thin window. Cabinet doors. A coffee table. A rug.
“A rug,” James said. He knelt to the ground and ran a glove over the hundreds of tiny tendrils, red and white fabric sea anemones.
It occurred to James that he was in a nice house. The nicest he’d ever been in.
He rose and turned and saw a pool table. The balls were racked at one end. The cue waited at the other.
Play me, it seemed to say. But don’t ask how.
James gripped a stick from a wall mount. Then he paused.
Staring into the space beyond the other end of the table, it felt like someone could be there. Someone to play a game with. As if, were he to break the balls, unseen fingers might take the stick from him, might go next.
He set the cue back into the mount. Then, taking the breathing tube’s slack up by his hip, he exited the lounge.
He stepped into a new room, but before he could determine what sort it was, his flashlight died.
Darkness.
Alone with it.
Clumsily, through the ape gloves, James clicked the flashlight’s switch on/off, on/off. He shook it, then cracked it against his hip. The suit was too bulky there so he tried it against his other arm. Too bulky there, too. He raised it up to his helmet, brought the dead flashlight back, and…stopped.
Don’t break your helmet, man. What are you thinking?
He let his arms fall by his sides. No light.
He stared into the darkness ahead, felt the cold of the darkness behind. Without light, he could be anywhere in the house. Upstairs, downstairs. Outside. In. The house might not exist at all. Why, he could be standing on the bottom of an empty lake. Could be sleeping. Could be awake.
James tried to smile, tried to stay calm, but it was very hard to do in the dark.
“Hi, Amelia,” he said, thinking a pretend-communication with her might help. It didn’t. And he wished he hadn’t. It made him feel more alone. Made her seem farther away. Or like he was leaving her name down here.
Like he was delivering Amelia’s name to the darkness.
He tried the flashlight again.
On/off.
It worked.
Light.
Ahead, not twenty feet from where he stood rooted, was a staircase. A wide one. Two could walk it, side by side.
Amelia, he thought. The light didn’t work for a second and man, I thought I was gonna shit the suit.
A red runner lined the stairs, molded to each step.
James held the light fixed at the top for a long time.
He wanted to climb the stairs, wanted to see what the second floor had to offer. But he’d had enough. For now.
He exited the way he’d come, not pausing to examine a single item. Through the lounge, the study, the dining room, the foyer, and the half front door.
Swimming up, he felt bulkier than ever. The house seemed to sink in slow motion beside him. And when he broke the surface, Amelia’s smiling face was as welcome as any he’d ever seen.
James bobbed for a moment, treading six feet from the canoe.
Amelia called out.
“How’d it go?”
Back in the canoe, he told her. And with each detail, her wonder grew wider.
“So you made it to the bottom of the stairs?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“So I should probably climb them.”
James paused before answering.
“Sure. If you want to.”
“In the name of exploring,” Amelia said, “I need to go farther than you did, right?”
“Sure. Yes.”
Amelia clapped her hands together.
“Help me get the helmet on.”
“The flashlight was acting up on me,” he said.
“It was?”
“Yeah.”
Amelia took it from him and tried it out.
“It’s working now.”
“Yeah. But, you know, it went out for a minute.”
Amelia looked over the edge, to the roof in the murky shadows.
“If it goes out,” she said, “I’ll just feel my way back.”
James laughed. He tried to recall exactly how scared he’d been, but now that he was safe, it was hard.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
While she got into the suit, she thought about being in the dark down there alone. She repeated phrases like It’s worth it and Nobody ever did anything great by being too scared to do it.
These helped.
Before she slipped her arms into the sleeves, James reached out and touched her arm.
“What did you do that for?”
But the look in James’s eyes told her that he didn’t quite know. That he’d seen her pale soft skin and had wanted to touch her. And that was all it was.
“Sorry,” he said. He could feel himself turning red.
“Don’t be,” Amelia said. She con
sidered foolishly reaching out and touching him, too. To make him feel better. And because she wanted to.
Then she slipped her arms into the sleeves. Her hands into the huge gold gloves.
Once she got in the water, James tapped on the helmet’s glass.
She looked up at him, breathing steady, inquisitive. James thought she looked like a kid, a small girl in that big suit.
“Careful of the hose,” James said. “It could get snagged on something. Doorways. Tables.”
Amelia gave him a gloved thumbs-up.
Then she went under.
James watched her sinking past the roof, into the shadows. Soon she was only a tube, a thin line swallowed by the darkness.
Then James saw an eye, looking at him from the upstairs window.
“Amelia!” he yelled. He went to grab the hose, to yank on it, to pull her back up. But the eye moved and James saw it was a fish.
Only a fish in the upstairs window. As natural as anything could be in a lake.
Only a fish.
16
The flashlight was acting up on me.
Amelia stood at the bottom of the staircase, shining the flashlight in question up to the top of the stairs.
Maybe she should’ve heeded James’s warning. Maybe they should have gone and bought another one.
But she’d wanted to look adventurous. And she was feeling adventurous. And when she was still up on the sunny surface it didn’t sound so bad if the lights went out below. Dark and cold. It was just underwater, after all. What was dark but the absence of light? And what was cold but a temperature? Night in winter. Amelia had experienced it all before.
Still…
She was kneeling, studying the runner that lined the stairs. The hose’s slack was delicately piled beside her. She didn’t know the first thing about water damage or what ought to happen to a rug that’s been underwater for this long, but she could guess that it shouldn’t look as fine as it did.
It looked new.
Kind of.
In a classic sort of way.
She looked to the top of the stairs, the light still focused on the highest step. It was black up there. Impenetrable. No light came through a second-story window. Probably blocked by the roof. Or maybe all the doors were closed up there.
A House at the Bottom of a Lake Page 5
