“Just a bit tired,” she said.
“Nu-uh,” Marcy said, shaking her head no.
Amelia saw the bottom of James’s bare feet as he was swallowed by the darkness of the lake.
“Come on, Marcy. I’m fine.”
“Okay. But if you spend another ten minutes in here, I’m calling the heartbreak police.”
Amelia tried to smile. It was hard.
Marcy left her.
Amelia crouched and set the cereal on the floor beside the box of rice. She thought of James’s sperm, fanning out, a slo-mo explosion, how cool it looked, how amazing everything was up until then…up until exactly then.
Amelia opened the box of rice and heard Marcy goofing off in the next aisle. It sounded like she was…squishing something. Wringing out a rag. Something wet.
Has she ever lost everything? Amelia thought. Everything all at once?
It sounded like Marcy dropped something. A wet plopping sound. It had the unmistakable tone of a friend sneaking up on you.
“Careful, Marcy,” she called.
A second plop. This one louder. Sounded to Amelia like wet shoes.
“Marcy?”
Sometimes, after you’d come back in from taking out the trash, your shoes squeaked on the grocery store’s linoleum floor. It was a joke among the co-workers. Watch out for slime out by the dumpster. It likes you. It’s gonna follow you back in.
Another squish from the aisle over and Amelia felt the first real wave of fear. It did come like that, in a wave, not from her mind to her body, but rather like the unseen waves beneath the surface of the third lake: It attacked your face and front first, then wrapped itself around the rest of you.
“Marcy?”
Another slow wet step. As if the person wearing the wet shoes didn’t know exactly how to walk.
Or like they haven’t walked on dry land in a long, long time, Amelia.
“Marcy?”
Tears started to blur the bottom of Amelia’s eyes. She looked up, slowly, to the round security mirror hanging from the grocery store ceiling.
Was there something in the aisle over? Was there?
“Amelia! What’s wrong with you today?”
Marcy. Behind her. At the end of the aisle.
Another wet step. Approaching the far end of the aisle over.
“What is that sound, Marcy?” Amelia asked, her eyes bright and afraid.
“What sound?”
Amelia got up. She looked to the opposite end of the aisle, where whoever walked on the other side would no doubt show, would no doubt come sloshing for Amelia.
“Oh Jesus, Marcy. I have to go.”
“Go? Are you crazy, Amelia?”
Amelia backed up to Marcy, felt her behind her, but didn’t take her eyes off the end of the aisle.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice shaking. “I have to go. I have to go. Now.”
“Amelia, you can’t—”
Amelia gasped as a woman passed the end of the aisle. She was wearing a green tank top and bright orange shorts. Sunglasses and a visor. She carried a snorkel she’d just taken from the aisle over, and her flip-flops made squishy sounds as she passed.
Amelia looked at Marcy.
Then she broke out laughing. It wasn’t hard to do.
“Amelia, what the hell?”
Then, Amelia’s name again, this time spoken from the end of the aisle where the woman just passed.
“Amelia.”
A boy’s voice.
Before turning to face him, Amelia knew who it was. How could she not? She’d replayed his voice a thousand times over the last week.
“James.”
James stood shamefaced at the end of the aisle.
No, Amelia thought. Not shame. Fear.
“I’m sorry I came to your work,” he said. “But it came to my house last night.”
Amelia didn’t respond. Not directly.
“Marcy,” she said, still staring at James. Her voice was firm, the firmest it’d been in a week. “Can you leave us alone for a minute?”
“Sure thing.”
Then Marcy slipped out of the aisle behind her and Amelia and James faced each other in silence.
It came to my house last night.
And no response from Amelia. As if she wasn’t surprised.
We left the lake, they both thought, in their own words. But the lake wants us back.
One week.
One week apart.
Amelia rushed to him.
She hugged him hard. All of her warring emotions found room to breathe and she cried. But she smiled, too. James gently held the back of her head and pulled her close, closer, until it felt like nothing could pull her from his grip again. Not even waves.
“James,” she said. “James, are we going crazy?”
“We need a third party,” he said. “We need to tell someone.”
“No,” Amelia said. “Not that.”
James looked deep into her eyes. Were he and Amelia at the same place with this? Or was Amelia somewhere deeper?
“Then what? What do we do?”
“Hear me out,” she said, pulling her head from his chest. Facing him.
“Okay. What?”
She paused. She breathed deep. And she told him.
“We need to go back.”
“Amelia…”
“We need to introduce ourselves, James. We need to say hello.”
James held her. He’d come to Darlene’s with a mind to do whatever it was Amelia thought they should do. But he couldn’t hold on to the word hello and it slipped from between his fingers and splattered, wet, to the grocery store floor.
“Okay,” he said, loving her, in love with her, wanting her to be happy. “Okay.”
But as she hugged him he understood that he wasn’t just doing what Amelia wanted to do. The moment he said okay he’d felt a relief he hadn’t known in seven days.
No, Amelia wasn’t in any deeper than James was. She’d just figured out a reason to do exactly what he wanted so badly to do.
To go back.
Back to the house.
We should introduce ourselves. We need to say hello.
“Do you think it will welcome us?” he asked, horror and relief somehow mingling in his blood.
Amelia nodded.
“We live there, too, James. We live there, too.”
30
Paddling across the first lake felt different because they were paddling toward some thing, not some place.
Squeezing through the graffitied tunnel felt different because they pushed in order to reach some thing, not some place.
And standing on the raft, looking down into the water, felt different because they both believed something was looking back, through the windows of that wonderful, magic place below.
31
James dove in first, no doubt in an effort to show Amelia he was on board with her idea, though he didn’t feel much different inside. And yet the moment his shoulders split the cool water, as the surface spread like lips, sucking him in, James understood there was really no other option. Because the only other thing to do would be to not come back. And they couldn’t do that. They wouldn’t do that. This was their clubhouse, their tree house, their secret, theirs.
Swimming toward the muddy lake floor, sensing Amelia had broken the surface above him, James recalled a time when he was ten years old. He and some friends had a clubhouse of their own. They called it Potscrubber and Potscrubber was no more than a huge cardboard box, cut open, placed against two trees, creating a bivouac, a shelter for their secrets, too. The box itself had once been used for a dishwashing machine and the label potscrubber was on the inside of the clubhouse, always in sight.
James reached the bottom,
lowered his flippers to the mud, and felt the familiar sinking, the becoming one with the foundation of the plot.
Their plot.
He thought of the spider they found in Potscrubber.
Derrick looked it up in his encyclopedia and said it was poisonous. Called it a brown recluse and said one bite could kill a man. Jerry said Derrick had the wrong spider, said they looked alike but that wasn’t it. Derrick didn’t want to go back. Said they should leave Potscrubber, too, just leave it there in the woods. Wasn’t any good anymore.
But Jerry wanted to get rid of it. And so did James.
The friends returned to Potscrubber.
Amelia touched down beside him and they turned to face the house together. They shone their lights into the darkness on either side of the house first, as if looking for (someone in the yard) movement. Their beams extended into forever, or nothingness, as both felt the same. They illuminated the front windows. They were very aware that they were looking for someone. Checking (is anybody home?) for faces. That’s what they were there to do.
To introduce ourselves.
James thought of the spider bites on Jerry’s arms and legs. The chunks the doctors had to take out of Jerry’s right thigh and left biceps. How his clothes hung slack ever after.
Amelia tapped James on the shoulder.
Are you ready? she seemed to be asking.
James nodded. He was ready.
Amelia swam ahead, through the half front door.
James followed.
In his light, flecks of mud rose in a circle around her flippers. In her light, he saw the inside of the house, piecemeal, in parts. It had been a week. A week without.
It felt savory, the brief images, relief.
Suddenly Amelia turned around and swam back to James. She gripped him by the sides of his head and pressed her mask against his. Peace. James and Amelia. Back underwater. Back in the house.
What had he lost after all? Nothing. He’d lost nothing.
Amelia said something, words he couldn’t understand. Then she was off. Swimming into the darkness.
And James followed.
Deeper.
Deepest yet.
32
Inside, swimming apart, then together, Amelia vanished behind a partially opened door. James paused to shine his light under the pool table, into the corners, the murky blackness falling in, rolling in, whenever he drew the light away. Amelia saw it, saw the darkness at bay, saw the darkness return, by the flickering, anxious movements of James’s light. James saw it, too, saw the edges of the dark like physical planes, touchable down here, always down here. He saw it gripping the beam of Amelia’s light like black hands, black lips, swallowing.
The darkness was present, even when it was lit.
Through the study, the lounges, the library, the kitchen, where James had gotten scared by the pepper shaker. Into the Florida room, walls of glass looking out into the murky depths, fish swimming past, through their wavering beams, fish no more colorful than the water, than the dull rippling grays and blacks, blending in, not wanting to be seen, not wanting to be met. Flecks of mud floating like dust above a dirt road, unseen footsteps bringing it up, bringing it to life. James and Amelia paused here, pressing their beams to the glass, feeling small in size, in comparison with the boundaryless body of the mountains, the lake, the house.
They once imagined gardens of their own growing in that lifeless mud; colorless flowers swaying in the under-waves.
Were these dreams still possible? Was everything possible now?
They swam on, swerving through the halls, avoiding lamps, dressers, swimming up over couches, diving below chandeliers and lightbulbs alike. At the basement door, Amelia paused and looked James in the eye. She shone the light on her own face and mouthed the word sauna. And though James hadn’t thought about it himself since they saw it, he knew what door she was referring to. The closed wooden door by the indoor pool. The one room they hadn’t checked in the house. Would they find the object of their search there? A towel around its waist, sweat pouring from its impossible brow?
Behind the basement door and well below it, a swimming pool sat in complete darkness, its water somehow untangled from the water of the lake. Maybe they’d find it there. Wading waiting, waiting wading.
“Sauna,” James said and Amelia pushed open the basement door. James followed her into the darkness. He followed her down the stairs, hearing in his memory the things she’d recently said. He used her words to battle through the rising curtain of bad feelings, the idea that they shouldn’t be here, that this wasn’t just love anymore.
This was danger.
But the elixir of being inside the house again made it easier to shove these fears aside.
Down the stone steps they swam, beneath the low-hanging support beams, until their flashlights revealed the rippling water below. It flowed in the opposite direction of the water they swam in, as if the ghost of a second moon orbited the pool, causing a second tide.
Just past the pool, Amelia shone her light upon the smooth wood door of the sauna.
James thought of Potscrubber. He couldn’t help it.
Amelia placed a hand on the sauna door.
James gripped her wrist. When she turned to face him, he saw the obsession in her eyes.
Jerry, he remembered saying, as the walls of Potscrubber trembled on their own, there’s another one on your shoulder.
“Be careful,” James said. But it came out unintelligible. A useless warning. One he wasn’t adhering to himself.
And yet Amelia must have read his lips, for she responded in kind.
“Of course.”
Then she smiled and gave him that same thumbs-up. This time without shame.
Here we go, she seemed to say. Where we’ve been going all along.
She pushed gently on the wood and the door opened.
They entered the sauna, and their lights revealed empty wooden benches. A cold stove.
But James felt hot.
He shone the light upon the stove, convinced it had to be on after all, sure that the sauna was functioning, inexplicably, like everything else in the house. He looked over his shoulder in time to see the door slowly swinging closed, like every other door, riding the unseen undulations at the bottom of the lake. But this time it felt different. It looked different, too.
Deliberate? James thought. But it was not a question, rather an elusive word finally found.
Someone is closing the door. We’re going to boil to death in here.
His mask began to fog.
Fear?
Heat?
He grabbed Amelia by the arm and swam toward the closing door, dragging her until she swam on her own, James leading the way now, his palm against the wood, pressing back, pushing hard, expecting resistance, and finding none.
The door swung open, easily. James shone his light behind it.
Nobody.
Nothing.
Not here.
But somebody.
Upstairs.
James and Amelia looked up together, to the familiar sound of the ceiling creaking.
A thudding above. Sluggish.
Deliberate.
Had it tried to trap them? And would it try to again?
They followed the sound with their eyes, treading above the pool, then the tiles bordering the pool, as the wide creaking steps drifted farther from them, heading, it seemed, to the basement door.
Without hesitation, Amelia swam toward it. Toward the approaching sound.
At first, James couldn’t move. Didn’t want to move. Whatever was in this house was approaching, was near, and though they had agreed to greet it, James found that when the moment was upon him, the agreement seemed insane. Frozen with indecision, he watched her grow smaller. His fear expanded. And even th
en, as Amelia went to the sound, to the beat of his horror, he didn’t want to be alone, didn’t want to float here, tread by the sauna alone. James went to her, to catch her, to catch up, aware of the open space behind him, the growing space.
Ahead, Amelia vanished, up the stairs.
We should introduce ourselves.
And so she was.
James entered the stone corridor of stairs, felt the pressure of the growing space behind him. His arms and legs tingled, like when a child races up from the basement, sure that something wet, something old, was seconds away from taking hold of his ankle.
Come back, James, it would say, the words as bloated as its face. Stay a little longer.
Oh, the feeling that something was near, was closing in, would grab him and drag him flailing back to the sauna where this time the door would close, the door would lock, where James would boil to death, screaming inside his mask, boiling, burning, blistering.
The growing space.
He swam up the stairs and it felt like running uphill, the resistance, the fatigue, the impatience of a nightmare. Amelia was out of range, out of sight. He called to her, but his words were a series of useless bubbles that popped against the interior of the mask in rhythm with the elongated thuds from the ceiling.
The ceiling.
The ceiling.
Where the creaks continued. Where the sound of wide steps went on.
James reached the top of the stairs and crashed through the door. The thudding went on, the steps, pounding in his head, pounding in his bones; the beat of dead skins stretched taut across steel drums made from the body of a battered canoe.
He reached out, into the darkness, hoping to find her, to pull Amelia away from whatever made that sound, whatever was coming, whatever she wanted so desperately to meet.
We went crazy, James thought. We went crazy in love.
The thought was clear, defined, despite the frantic ramble around him. He shone his light manic throughout the room. To the two doors, two exits, both partially open. To the chairs and the cushions that did not float above them. To the end table and the ashtray that did not float above it. To the shelves where books in impossible condition did not succumb to the laws of nature. To the ceiling where solid wood beams did not wither to chips.
A House at the Bottom of a Lake Page 10
