The Light in the Lake

by Sarah R. Baughman

  That’s when I know for sure I really do miss Maple Lake. I feel it deep down, like water feels the wind pushing up waves. Mama and Dad and I haven’t been there since before. But I don’t think Amos would like it if I stayed away forever. And I realize now, I don’t want to.

  “If you applied, I think it could work out well,” Mr. Dale says. “Scientifically speaking, you’re a very strong candidate. You ask questions. And you think about things in different ways, like what you said about drawing the moon. Those are good qualities for a scientist to have.”

  I stand up a little straighter. “Thanks.”

  “Take this home,” Mr. Dale says, handing me an application. “Talk about it with your parents. See what they say.”

  “I don’t need to talk to them about it.” I feel something inside pulling me toward Maple Lake now, even though it’s the last place most people would expect me to go. “I’ll apply.”

  Chapter 2

  Liza and I line up for the bus together, arms linked, like always. I didn’t tell her about the Young Scientist position at lunch or study hall. Not yet.

  Liza was born just a couple of months before Amos and me. Sometimes Aunt Mary and Mama called us the triplets, and even though it wasn’t technically true, it didn’t quite feel wrong either. A lot of times I can tell what Liza’s feeling, even when she’s not saying a thing.

  Like right now, I know she’s thinking hard. Worried. She’s chewing the side of her lip like she does when she’s working on one of her sketches and thinks she messed it up but doesn’t know how to fix it. She pulls me a little closer.

  “Want to come over today?” she asks, quietly enough that nobody else can hear.

  Amos and I used to go over to Liza’s a lot after school. Her bus stop came before ours and Aunt Mary was always home by the time we got there, so if we knew Mama needed to sleep before work or Dad was still on a job site, it made sense. But I haven’t been going over as much lately. Not since Amos died.

  I wish I could explain this to Liza, but I don’t even know if I can really understand it myself. Shouldn’t I want to hang out with my cousin, the only other person who knew Amos close to as well as I did? The only person who wouldn’t just stare at me with big, scared eyes if I started crying out of nowhere, or accidentally talking about Amos like he was still there?

  “Um, I can’t today.” The words feel sharp, even though I don’t mean them to be. “I have homework, and I think I need to start dinner because Mama’s working…” The rest of the sentence wanders away. I don’t need to look at Liza to know she’s trying to look like everything’s okay, like whatever I want is fine.

  “No worries,” she says. Our bus is pulling up, and Liza lets go of my arm as the doors heave open. My chest aches.

  “Hi there, girls,” Barbara Ann says from the driver’s seat. “All aboard!” She takes one hand off the steering wheel to motion us up the steps, then winks one blue-shadowed eye.

  Barbara Ann’s one of Mama’s best school friends and even babysat Amos and me sometimes when Aunt Mary couldn’t, so I think I know her pretty well. I know you can count on her for a few things. Number one: frizzy brown hair that sticks out in places. She never pulls it back; it just falls all around her shoulders like milkweed fluff. Number two: bright red lipstick. Number three: gum, usually watermelon-flavored, and usually snapped between her teeth while she’s talking, which she does a lot.

  Snap. I guess there’s a number four: the good mood. Barbara Ann really doesn’t stop smiling, which comes in handy on days when I don’t have the energy to do it myself. It reminds me of being little, learning to ride a two-wheeler: Mama would give me a little push on the back of the seat to get me started. Barbara Ann’s smiles feel just like that.

  “Hey, Barbara Ann,” I say. And I make my lips go up at the corners.

  She grabs my wrist. “Wait a second,” she says. “Isn’t tomorrow—”

  “Yeah, I’ll be twelve,” I say. “Saturday. Guess I got lucky.” The words taste sour. Pretending to be happy about a weekend birthday with no school seems stupid this year, but it also feels like a normal thing to say.

  The nice thing about Barbara Ann’s smiles is they aren’t fake. When her lips kind of roll together, like they have to press hard to keep something else out, I can tell she’s thinking about Amos and how he’ll never be twelve. But her smile’s still real. She looks right at me too, which is something people sometimes seem scared to do when they remember about Amos.

  “You have a good birthday tomorrow, honey,” she says. Then she reaches in her shirt pocket, pulls something out, and presses it into my hand.

  “Found this,” she whispers. “An early present. Keep it safe.” I walk toward the back of the bus and find my seat by Liza just as Barbara Ann shifts into gear and we roll away.

  “What did she give you?” Liza leans over, trying to catch a glimpse of my hand.

  “I don’t know.” The thing, whatever it is, is smooth, curved, with a sharp point. I don’t want to open my hand, though. When I realize I’m waiting for Amos to come so he can see whatever it is too, tears start and I have to blink hard. Liza hooks her hand through the crook of my elbow, pulls me a little closer on the seat.

  I picture Amos across the aisle, leaning over for a closer look. “Open it!” he’d whisper, loudly enough for me to know he meant it. But of course if he were here, he’d probably have one too. He would already know what it was because he never would have been able to wait.

  I let my fingers open and there it is: white, quarter-moon-shaped. Perfect.

  “A tooth?” Liza’s nose wrinkles. “Has Barbara Ann completely lost it?”

  “It’s a white whale tooth.” I would know one anywhere; Amos and I love—loved—to collect them. Over ten thousand years ago, the Atlantic Ocean flooded over land pressed low by glaciers, and white whales swam right through it. Only when the land rose back up, filling with fresh water draining off the mountains, did the whales go away. Even so, they left evidence of themselves: one of their skeletons turned up in a farmer’s field over in Charlotte a long time ago, and now it’s our state fossil. “But it’s a really big one. Huge, actually. Almost—” I stop.

  “Almost what?”

  “Nothing.” I shake my head. There are some things I don’t want to tell even Liza. Like how if Amos were here, he’d say there was no way a white whale could have this big a tooth, that it had to come from somewhere—something—else. Like the creature, swimming through the deepest parts of Maple Lake.

  It wasn’t really like Amos to keep secrets, but I know he didn’t say anything about the creature to anyone else, not even Liza. He wanted to prove it first. “You’re a scientist, Ad,” he said. “You can help.”

  But I didn’t believe him.

  Liza shifts in her seat and clears her throat, a sure sign she’s changing the subject to something brighter, something that won’t make my eyes blur and sting.

  “So, have you thought about the calf at all?” she asks. “Dad said I should double-check, be sure you still wanted to.” She twists her fingers together, waiting for me to say something back. I slip the tooth into my pocket and nod.

  Liza always raises a calf as a 4-H project to bring to the Shoreland County Fair. Aunt Mary and her husband, my uncle Mark, have a dairy farm, so every spring Liza has plenty of calves to choose from. This year, a month or so after Amos died, she asked if I wanted to help her take care of a calf and learn how to show it in the ring. She even said I could pick out whichever one I liked best, that she’d wait until I had the chance to come over. She knew I loved the calves, with their big brown eyes and their knobby knees and their tails flicking flies.

  After Amos died, so much just stopped in its tracks. But the calves were born, just like they were always going to be. And the fair would still happen. And now, even though it feels weird to keep doing things, even though my stomach spins just thinking about it, I hear myself saying “I’m in.”

  “Good,” she says. “You’l
l already be around anyway, right?”

  Amos and I didn’t just go to Liza’s after school; we spent a lot of time there in the summer too. When we were little, it was so Aunt Mary could babysit us. But as we got older, it became our job to watch Liza’s little sisters so Aunt Mary could work more around the farm with Uncle Mark.

  “Sure I will.” But I remember what Mr. Dale said too, about going to the biological station every day. If I get to be the Young Scientist, I’ll need to explain to Liza that even though I can still help with the calf, I won’t be able to come as often as she thinks, or stay as long.

  Maybe I should tell her about the position right now. I usually tell her everything. “Actually,” I say, “there’s this thing—”

  Liza’s eyes get wide, swollen with worry. I know this look. It’s the same one she gave me when Amos and I both got bronchitis right before the sixth-grade Spring Fling and I told her, hacking into my elbow when she knocked on my door, that we couldn’t go with her after all. It’s hard to look at someone’s face and see all this hope shining… and then just snuff it out.

  “Never mind,” I say. “I thought I might need to help my parents out at home, but I don’t think I will after all.”

  “Good,” Liza says, and rests her cheek on my shoulder. I tip my head to lean against hers and her brown curls tickle my forehead.

  “I’m glad you’ll be able to hang out,” she says. “It’ll just be—lonely this summer, otherwise. If you’re not there.”

  I don’t understand how Liza could feel lonely in a house with three sisters. I think about just saying that out loud—I kind of want to—but I hold back and point to the sketchbook on her lap instead. She carries it everywhere. “Can I take a look?” I ask.

  “Not yet,” she says. “I’ve been working on most of it at home anyway. Maybe when you come over tomorrow, you can see some sketches. I’m entering the Shoreland Art Show this year and I have a whole portfolio I need to put together.”

  I feel my eyebrows shooting up before I really want them to. It’s not that Liza isn’t talented, but the Shoreland Art Show is kind of a big deal.

  “Yeah, I know,” Liza says, reading my mind as usual. “Not likely.”

  “I didn’t say that.” I don’t want Liza to think I don’t believe in her. I do. But I also know kids from all over the state enter. “Do they have a separate category for middle school?”

  Liza shakes her head. “Whatever I enter is going to get thrown right in with the high school kids’ stuff,” she says. “I’ll be at the very bottom of the youngest age bracket. I could use some advice on my entry.”

  “You can do it,” I say. “I’ll help if I can.”

  I mean it too. The last person who asked me for help was Amos, and I wish I had done more.

  I remember when he came back from Teddy’s store that first Saturday in March, his bike tires slicing through soft leftover snow. I can’t believe it was only three months ago now, one of those days that felt like spring but wasn’t. The sun shone so bright, it made us all think winter might end early. We had nearly a week of those days. Too many, I know now. The sun that beat on our shoulders and peeled off our coats turned the lake ice weak, brought pockets of melt up to the surface, daring it to crack.

  But that day, just about a week before he left me forever, Amos hopped off his bike and let it tip over. He reached toward me, holding a notebook, the kind you can buy for fifty cents at Teddy’s, with a cover that flips up and folds back. Small enough to fit in my pocket.

  “What’s it for?” I asked. But I kept my hands knotted behind my back.

  He leaned in. “Keeping track of the creature.” Barely a whisper. “Remember?”

  And I laughed. Not in a mean way, but still.

  “There’s no creature,” I said. “Besides, why are you whispering?”

  Amos looked over his shoulder as though spies were hiding in the woods past our house. “I just don’t want anyone else to know but you and me,” he said. “Not yet. Not until I prove it for sure. So that means I need to keep researching. We need to.”

  If there really were a magical creature down there in the lake, old as glaciers, moving dark and cold, Amos would be the one to find it. But I didn’t believe it existed. There couldn’t be any real evidence for something like that, and I told Amos so.

  “C’mon, Addie,” he said, his eyes soft. Hurt. “You’ll see. I’ve been writing clues down since last fall.” He patted his back pocket, where another line of silver coils stuck out.

  “Clues about a creature,” I repeated. “That doesn’t sound very scientific. If you ever wanted to prove it, you’d need actual evidence.”

  He shook the notebook a little, urging me to take it. “Maybe you could find some of your own,” he said. “You could try.”

  Finally I untwisted my hands and took what he offered and stuck it in my pocket. But not because I actually believed.

  I think I did it because of his eyes. They usually glittered, like sun on cedar leaves, and I didn’t like the look of them clouded over, all the hope of working together sucked away. So I held out my hand and the sun came back out. Just like that.

  I’ve been telling myself I’ll open his notebook tomorrow, on our birthday. It won’t hurt to at least read what he had to say. What I never wanted to hear when I had the chance. But now I don’t know if I’m ready. Maybe because picking up his notebook and reading it myself, without him there, is only something I can do because he’s gone. Forever.

  If Amos were here, he’d be running up the bus aisle, breaking all of Barbara Ann’s rules, demanding she tell him where she got the tooth. He’d be pulling the notebook out of his pocket and bugging me for a pencil.

  I close my fingers back around the tooth. I let it dig right into my skin.

  Chapter 3

  My birthday starts with emptiness, the kind of quiet that comes from sounds that don’t mean anything. I lie on the bottom bunk trying to hear something other than the faucet, water spilling into the sink, Dad clearing his throat, Mama knocking glasses against the counter, the refrigerator buzzing. But there’s nothing else. No voices. On the top bunk, an empty mattress bears down.

  Mama said she’d get me a different bed. Dad said he’d haul this one away, chop it up. He even promised to burn it, his eyes raw, his voice almost shaking. I believed him. I could almost see his dry, cracked hands tearing the panels apart, stacking them just right, lighting a match.

  But they didn’t. The top bunk’s still here and Amos’s clothes still hang in the closet. Sometimes I pull one of his shirts out and put it on, just to feel it. And I keep lying there every night, half expecting Amos to hang his face over the edge and whisper: “You awake?”

  Silence pours into the space left by the whispers, but all I have to do is wait. Every time that silence starts to feel like it could swallow me up, a warm feeling wraps itself around my body and squeezes. When it’s there, I can’t move, but I don’t want to either. I just press my fingertips into my sides and squeeze back until I can’t squeeze anymore.

  I lift the corner of my mattress and pull out Amos’s notebook. Even though I still haven’t opened it, I’m glad I kept it. I threw the one he gave me, blank, into Maple Lake the last time I went there, the day after Mama and Dad and I huddled under weeping cedar trees, staring at that shimmering hole in the ice. It was long gone. But here was Amos’s, real as skin. If Dad had lit that match, I might not have found the courage to rescue his notebook from where I knew he kept it under his mattress.

  Pain swells but I hold the notebook in my palm. It shakes a little, and I try to make my hands quiet. Opening a notebook should be so easy. Just flip the cover back. But I can’t make my fingers do it. I just sit, feeling my head throb, staring at what Amos wrote on the front—CLUES in big block letters crossed out with a black marker, EVIDENCE written above it.

  He must have done that for me.

  But what kind of evidence could he possibly have found?

  I close my eyes a
nd picture Maple Lake shimmering under the sun. There are scientific facts I know about it. I can tell you it’s three hundred feet at its deepest point. I can tell you it’s full of perch and lake trout. I can tell you that by mid-August, the average surface water temperature ranges from 67 to 73 degrees Fahrenheit.

  But I can’t tell you why, when I slide into that same water and stand with my toes just touching the sand at the bottom, the waves tipping me lightly back and forth, I feel like I could live there, warm and cold at the same time, filled up and fresh. I can’t tell you why the fish I catch look at me with their gold-and-black eyes, why they lie heaving and shining in my palm once I’ve pulled them out of the water, breathing at the same pace as the waves knocking the boat. And no matter how much I read about the very deepest bottom, about the cliff walls and mineral veins, I can’t tell you for certain how it feels at the exact point where the water turns from silver to midnight blue. I can’t tell you everything you might see once you’ve swum past the glacial formations and around every corner of the boulders that slump down, down, down, bigger than houses.

  There are things I can only imagine.

  And maybe those are the kinds of things Amos counted as evidence. Maybe those are the kinds of things I’ll find when I open this notebook.

  But I don’t. I pull on jeans and slip the notebook in my back pocket. Then I move from the silence hanging in my room to the silence Mama and Dad make in the kitchen.

  Dad sits at the table, pressing the fingers of one hand into closed eyes. He doesn’t see me.

  “Hey,” I whisper, a sound so small I think I might have imagined it. I take one step forward. Cough.

  Dad jolts then, looks at me. “Honey girl,” he says. His hands tremble but he opens his arms and I walk in. I sit on his knee even though I know I’m too old for that, especially now that I’m twelve, and lean against his shoulder. He smells like sawdust and sweat. I press my heels against the tops of his work boots, the hard leather slick and worn. Say something else, anything.