Ten-Word Tragedies

by Tim Lebbon

  ‘You’ve heard nothing from them since?’

  ‘Like I said.’

  He yields up the postcard again, a last communication from—where? An absence, now. A mystery. I have a sudden image of Dick and Edda floating in deep water—or perhaps it’s the sky, or perhaps it’s all one: 84 degrees the same as the air.

  ‘It’s just strange,’ he says, ‘because that’s not where they went.’

  I think of that picture of the Ringling Residence, combined with the information that they’d been swimming in the gulf.

  He goes on. ‘Their last known location was only a few miles inland from Sarasota. They were at a cabin at Myakka River, in the state park.’

  If he has any suspicion I know more than I’m saying it must be allayed by the expression on my face. A state park—Dick and Edda? It seems as likely as them going swimming. Less likely, even. I have an image of Dick tiptoeing through a swamp in his smart shoes, grimacing up at the wild birds.

  ‘Well, Ma’am, you’ll keep us informed if you hear anything.’

  I agree that of course I will and close the door after him, only then realising that Marni has been listening from the top of the stairs. I hear the bang as she shuts herself in her room and a moment later All I Have to Do is Dream floats into the air.

  Marni doesn’t come down, not even when I call her for dinner. I walk up the stairs again, wondering when she stopped playing her records. I hadn’t noticed the silence creeping back into the house.

  When I go into her room she has the same sightless expression in her eyes as when she was floating in the pool, but instead she’s gazing down at a book held in her lap. It’s illustrated, meant for a younger child, and my misgivings don’t subside when I see that it’s her book—the one Edda gave to her when Ada died. The girls used to love it when they were small, and it was always Marni’s favourite.

  It’s a book of Swedish fairy tales. Edda was of Scandinavian origin, her family having travelled the ocean to settle in New Sweden, further north on the Delaware. Dick was Pennsylvania Swiss; my husband was of English extraction, and I was born in the old country. Maplewood always had been a melting-pot.

  Edda told us once that her name, in ancient Scandinavian, meant ‘great-grandmother’. It was the perfect name for a story-teller, and she’d spread her book of fairy tales before her and read them aloud, enchanting us all.

  I knew which story Marni would be reading before I looked at the page. There was the picture they used to love—a little princess sitting at the edge of a dark pool, staring down into the water.

  Her name was Cottongrass, and she lived contentedly at her castle until she saw an elk, a thing of the wild, and begged him to take her to see the world. He warned her there was danger in it, but of course she wouldn’t listen. She flung herself onto his back and off she went, encountering wicked elves and the witch of the forest with tangled hair and reaching arms. Eventually they found a dark pool amid the trees. Cottongrass leaned over the water and saw there another forest, one she couldn’t reach; and the golden heart she wore about her neck slipped into its depths.

  She stared after it, caught in some spell, until no one could tell she had ever been a princess. There was only a tall plant tipped with cotton leaning over the water, and there she remained, always looking after her lost heart.

  The way Marni was staring at that picture now discomfited me, and I called her name, hearing the echo of another voice, another time:

  ‘Marni comes from the word Marina,’ Edda had once said. ‘It means ‘of the sea’.’ And then, ‘Margaret is from the Greek Margarites. It means ‘pearl’. A secret and underwater thing.’

  I reach out and take the book from Marni’s hands, closing it against that image of the dark pool. It is only then that she shifts, only then that she seems to realise I’m standing in front of her. There are tears in her eyes, salt water, and I want to brush them away, but her smile is so confused that I don’t touch her.

  ‘What did they mean?’ she asks.

  ‘Who, sweetie?’

  ‘They said the next postcard they sent was going to be for me.’

  An unpleasant jolt passes through me. ‘Nothing. Only that they’d address it to you, like they used to—remember?’ Even as I speak, I wonder if there was more to it. Had it been another way of saying that this card was meant just for me?

  She frowns, as if she doesn’t understand. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but what did they mean?’

  I just look at her. And all I can think is, why doesn’t she ask about the other line—the one about Ada? If she hadn’t seen it before, she must have heard the policeman talking about it. Why isn’t she wondering about that?

  But we don’t mention it. We remain quiet and a little dull all through dinner, although her father is home early. Paul keeps looking from one of us to the other as if to puzzle us out, but he doesn’t say much either. He tries to start a conversation about where we should go this summer, what we should do, but he soon gives up.

  After she helps clear the dishes, Marni goes outside into a golden evening full of the hum of insects. Somewhere close by, some boys are shooting baskets; the noise they make doesn’t seem to trouble her. She’s quite motionless, sitting by the side of the pool, staring down into the clear and lovely water.

  ———

  We hadn’t used to vacation apart. We used to go with the Ebersoles every year, having met through the girls, who were the same age. We’d grown close—had barbecues together at their peach-painted colonial, pool picnics at our place, hung out together at the block parties which were a regular feature of life in Maplewood. So when it came to the summer it seemed natural to choose a rental together too, to decide between us where to go and what to see.

  On the last trip we took together, Dick had wanted to visit some old country house. It had sounded dull even to us adults but we said we’d go too, and so did Marni; only Ada hadn’t. She’d just turned thirteen, though she was sensible, we all said so, and when she insisted she was old enough to take care of herself for a couple of hours, we’d agreed. And we hadn’t worried, not really; not until we got back and walked through the empty rooms, hearing no reply when we called her name.

  I can still remember, with absolute clarity, looking out of the French doors and seeing two feet floating in the pool, though I hadn’t recognised what they were, not all at once; not with the toes pointing downward.

  She was just as she had been in that line on the postcard: at the top and upside down, though she would never say hello to anybody ever again.

  I look out of the window now at Marni’s downturned face. Her hair is hanging over her eyes so that I can’t see her expression and something about the scene makes me shudder—the similarity, perhaps, to an illustration in a book. Is it the water itself that so draws her attention, or something else? It almost seems as if the word ‘water’ should be crossed out and replaced by something more mysterious: not a thing, but an empty space; an absence; a gulf.

  I jump when Paul comes and puts his head on my shoulder, wraps his arms around my waist. ‘About the summer,’ he murmurs.

  ‘Myakka,’ I hear myself say. ‘The state park, Paul. I want to go to Myakka River.’

  We’re gone later that same week—school is out, Paul is due the time off, and there’s no point in waiting. I only go to the Ebersole house once more, to retrieve Goldie—I leave him with a neighbour, likewise the orchid. The aspidistra’s too heavy; it will have to fend for itself.

  I called ahead, managed to reserve the same palm-log cabin that Edda and Dick last stayed in, but when we walk in the door I can’t sense anything of them. Of course, there’s no sign they’ve ever been here, which is to be expected. The park ranger told me they’d left their luggage behind, still unpacked in the various drawers and closets, but it’s all been cleared away. The police came by and looked at it, he said, but haven’t been back since.

  The cabin was built in the thirties by the Civilian Conservation Corps along with the pic
nic pavilions and visitor centre. It’s pretty comfortable, but too big; it was designed to sleep six and I can’t help thinking that’s how many we would once have been.

  The park, too, is huge. It hadn’t occurred to me before how very extensive it is—how impossible to follow where they have gone. Myakka River flows for mile upon mile through wetland, prairie and pineland. We saw the prairie from the road, dry and empty with treacherous sugar sand interspersed with grasses and palmetto, and I don’t feel drawn to it at all. But there are two lakes as well as the river, and thousands of wetland areas scattered across the park.

  We don’t go far on our first day. It’s getting late and we pause only to watch the sun spreading itself over the Myakka, Venus shining low in the sky. Marni scowls and slaps at the mosquitoes biting her arms. The banks of the river are hidden in reeds, and it takes me a while to see the night-heron standing at the edge, staring fixedly into the water until its head darts down. It straightens, its catch lost, and takes to wing.

  It was the Seminoles who called the river ‘Myakka’. If there was ever a translation, it has long since been lost.

  The water is wonderful warm, 84 degrees the same as the air.

  It’s so humid that night I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep. Paul’s a twitching weight next to me and it’s too hot to bear touching his skin. I must sleep however, because I wake at some unknown time of the night, thrashing the single sheet away from me, feeling like I’m drowning in its folds. Wonderful warm, I think, and open my eyes to see shifting veils of cloth and think of Dick and Edda immersed in some liquid too warm to be the sea; viscous and dark, like amniotic fluid. They’re waving their arms, though not to me. Their eyes don’t see me and I wonder what it is they’re focused upon. Have they found a pool they can stare into for ever? Or is it the faces of the dead they see all around them—have they found Ada at last?

  I lie there listening to the lonely cries of shorebirds coming out of the night until I sleep again. When I wake, Paul and Marni are making pancakes, and the smell is of home and Maplewood, somewhere safe and known, and I smile.

  We eat at the table in one corner of the big empty room. The sun is low but it’s already warm, and I sense the heat of deep green water coming from somewhere beyond the window.

  ‘I want to go swimming,’ Marni says, but that’s not what we do. It had come as an indefinable relief to me to know that she couldn’t, not here—the water isn’t fit for swimming. The river is wide and deep and wild. It’s a nature reserve. There are rare birds: roseate spoonbills as pink as flamingos, bald eagles, caracaras, sandhill cranes, black vultures. There are raccoons and opossums and whitetail deer, and there are alligators too, hidden in the reeds at the edge of the wetlands.

  And yet I know why my daughter longs for the water—the heat will be unbearable by midday. Is that why Dick and Edda had overcome their aversion and gone swimming, wherever they were? Had they simply wanted to cool off—something as ordinary as that?

  We spend the morning following the park drive, then trying to spot wildlife from the boardwalk by Upper Myakka Lake. We don’t see much; a couple of noisy families keep the birds at bay. Marni says little and I can see she’s bored already, unless it’s her innermost thoughts that are keeping her lips pursed. And suddenly I know what will happen. We’ll spend a day or so here, then the two of them will want to leave. They’ll want the cooler breezes of the coast; they’ll crave the sea. We’ll head west rather than east, having learned nothing. We’ll go home and eventually the Ebersole house will be sold and Ada and Edda and Dick will be nothing but a memory that occasionally surfaces, like a fish in a lake, there and then gone.

  When Marni clamours to go on the airboat lake tour, I plead a headache. Someone has to look for our friends; they can’t be altogether forgotten.

  I go back to the cabin first, searching the place as if Edda could have left some clue for me—a postcard perhaps, stuck to a pin-board—but there’s nothing, only plain log walls, not even a picture hanging there. I rummage through the field guides and nature books and information about the park but they’re all printed glossy pictures; there’s no way to reach beneath the surface. But it’s not in here that I’ll find them, I know that. They’re gone—vanished into water that feels like air, or perhaps into the soupy air that feels like water.

  I step outside again, not sure where I’m going to go. No one else is around—we’re surrounded by trees, though I can see other cabins through the trunks. The place seems empty. Any other guests must be out sightseeing, and there’s no reason for anyone else to wander here. A narrow track leads back to the road and a dirt path, narrower still, winds into the woods. I imagine Edda and Dick walking away between the trees, her blonde head next to his dark one, until they pass out of sight. But in that direction they’d only reach the lake—it’s where everyone goes, all the families with matching shirts and hats and sunburned noses.

  Instead, on a whim, I walk into the trees. There’s no trail here, no wooden signs to point the way. A straight line is impossible and I wind around their trunks, duck beneath low branches. Hard-packed dirt soon gives way to softer earth that stifles the sound of my steps. The wind turns the leaves this way and that, sighing like waves on the seashore. It feels almost as if they’re talking to me and I keep going, wandering until my feet begin to sink. Patches of reeds are showing beyond the trees; the purple of wild iris marks the edge of a marsh.

  I take another step and my sneaker is soaked. I draw back as a bird starts up from the reeds—black body, long legs, some kind of wader. I watch it go, then I’m startled again by the fleeting brilliance of a monarch butterfly.

  It’s beautiful, but I can’t continue, not this way. This is real wilderness. Surely no one could have come here. There’s no path and it’s half-flooded and I suddenly realise I’ve wandered at random—how will I find my way back with no markers, no map, no compass? But a leap of hope comes: the ground’s so soft I can surely follow my own footprints, and I turn and see a deer standing in front of me.

  It’s a whitetail, delicately boned, its hide softly dappled. Its nostrils are flared, twitching after my scent; its eyes are wide and fixed and looking straight at me. For a moment we regard each other. I wonder if there’s knowledge in its eyes but all I can see is fear; it must be reflected in my own.

  The deer bounds off, crossing my path in one huge leap, and away. Where it pushes the undergrowth aside I glimpse a new trail, hollowed into the earth and overgrown, canopied with twisting branches dripping with moss. Even the light is green.

  When the twigs spring back over it, it’s like the closing of a door. The energy drains from me. I could wander here for days. There are miles and miles of trees and swamp, all of it appearing exactly the same.

  I hurry to retrace my steps, but everything looks different. How could I have been so stupid? I picture Paul’s face when he realises I’m lost, his annoyance passing into disbelief. I imagine what he’d say to me if he could: But it was you who wanted to come, as if that should have protected me from this—the wilderness around me, the miles and miles of nothing.

  But there’s a twisted oak I recognise, and I duck under it, and then there’s a footprint after all. I keep walking, winding around the trunks, and eventually I catch a glimpse of hewn logs: the side of a cabin. It’s only then that my pulse ratchets, as if I hadn’t dared to admit the possibility of truly being lost until I was safe.

  I don’t want to return to the cabin though, not yet—I’ll only sit there, dwelling on the empty spaces and my own futility. Instead, I go to meet Marni and Paul from the boat. I arrive just as it’s coming in to dock and I see Marni leaning over the side, her hair stretching down towards the water. When she lifts her head and waves, she doesn’t look entranced; she only looks like what she is—a girl on vacation, saying something to her father and laughing, not thinking about anything else. Then she points—I’m just in time to catch the smooth slide of an alligator entering the lake.

  They’
re all exclamations and laughter. Paul bought some gator jerky on board and we share it, though I grimace at the salty taste. Marni doesn’t. She pulls a piece of it away with her back teeth then tells me they’ve done a deal; Paul is taking her kayaking tomorrow, if she’ll try some freshwater fishing. But she’d rather go fish in the sea.

  That evening the dark drops over the land before I even notice it’s there, and we settle down to read our various books. There’s no television in the cabin, but we can hear birds calling to each other, their eerie cries coming out of the tangle of trees that quickly fade out of sight. We close the curtains against them and I take out the volume I borrowed from Marni before we came away. It’s her book of fairy tales, and I read again about the girl’s encounter with the wilderness.

  The similarity with another tale strikes me—one that my mother had passed onto me, about Narcissus of Greek myth. He hunted stags in the forest, where he was followed by the nymph, Echo, who tried to embrace him with her reaching arms. When he rejected her, she faded away amid the lonely glens until only her voice remained. Narcissus, though, was punished by Nemesis. He discovered a deep pool hidden in the trees, and when he glimpsed his own reflection he fell in love. He gazed down at it until he died, when a flower grew in his stead.

  I suppose Edda too had been cursed with a love that could not be returned, that would always now be out of reach.

  Of course, it was not a stag I saw in the forest, or an elk; but the image returns to me of a deer’s fathomless eyes, its twitching ears, its wide nostrils; the strength in its slender legs as it left me in a few brisk leaps. It had no name, the thing I saw. I wonder what it sensed when it looked at me. Was it fleeing from the scent of something other? Or was it running towards something—had it caught the scent of the wild itself, and heeded its call, going ever deeper without looking back?

  I go to the window and peer through the curtains. I wonder if Edda had once stood in this very spot, doing the same thing. What had she heard, calling to her from out of the wilderness?