by Meg McKinlay
They didn’t drown the town.
Instead, two days later, they sent down a diver. He had flippers and a face mask and a proper underwater flashlight. And an oxygen tank, so he didn’t have to count and gasp and rocket himself off the bottom.
After a while, he came up. He frog-walked over to talk to the police sergeant, who frowned and nodded, then called to some other men who were waiting on the bank with a truck and a winch and some long metal cables.
Then the diver went back down, hauling the chains under with him, and slowly, carefully, they dragged the car up into the light.
I didn’t know how to feel. On the one hand, it was a relief that there was no Mrs. Finkle down there. That there would be no trunk popping open to reveal a skeleton, no bony arm lolling from a window.
But it felt wrong to be relieved. Because there was a body. Just not here. And I couldn’t help thinking about Liam’s brother — about Luke — just down the hall from me in the hospital.
I wasn’t there — not really — but I could remember it all the same.
The whole town gathered to watch the car come up. They came quietly up the hill, without potato salad or sausages.
The sign said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, but no one cared. They swung the busted gates open wide and pushed on through.
Liam sat with his mother and father on the edge of the bank and waited. All around, people were craning and leaning forward for the first glimpse, but no one moved in front of them.
Out on the lake, chains clanked and the old metal groaned. As the car broke the surface, tiny creatures scuttled across the hood and jumped for their lives. Water streamed down the sides, and lake weed hung from every angle, strung across the panels like raggedy stitches.
Liam’s dad stood up.
The car wasn’t the flashy bright red of a Mercedes anymore, but it was still red.
The whole town turned toward him.
He watched it hanging from the crane, swinging there like a pendulum, with the long dark wound in its side, the scrape of blue paint they would test later and discover exactly matched the paint on the Prices’ old car.
And he pumped his fist into the air and smiled.
Finkle confessed. As soon as the car came up, as soon as people saw the great smashed dent in its side, he started talking.
It was late. He was tired. It was a steep hill. He may have been going too fast. Oh, but it was hard to remember; it was such a very long time ago.
Wait, yes. No, it wasn’t. He had been going too fast. Much too fast.
He hadn’t stopped.
At the stop sign. Or afterward.
He had plowed into the Prices’ car, sending it spinning and spinning toward the clock tower.
He had spun and spun, too, then found himself straight, back on the road. Panicking. Driving away.
There was no excuse for it. No excuse at all.
He talked on and on. He put his head in his hands. Journalists tried to ask him questions, but they couldn’t get a word in. It was like he had been waiting to let this out all these years. It was like a dam bursting.
He was famous now, just as he’d always hoped. Except instead of “CENTENARY MAYOR” and “LANDMARK EVENT,” it was “LOCAL MAYOR ADMITS HIT-AND-RUN” and “MYSTERY CAR AT BOTTOM OF LAKE.”
And my personal favorite: “UNLIKELY ATLANTIS REVEALS ITS SECRETS.”
They put me in the paper, too: “LOCAL GIRL SWIMS LAKE: BRAVE DASH UNCOVERS TRUTH.”
I had made those stories.
And some others.
Already Elijah was saying, You looked so tiny all the way out there and Mate, my brain just went blank; and Hannah was saying, That was so sneaky, the way you had your shirt all buttoned up — I knew something was going on; and Mom was saying, I can’t believe you went up there all on your own and I almost died when I saw it on the news.
They played the footage over and over — of me in the lake in my striped bikini, waving my shirt, of Finkle bringing his arm down, of Liam leaning out the window of the car, pointing, like a soldier leading a charge.
When I thanked Elijah for sounding his horn, he grinned. “I had to do something, you idiot.”
But when I thanked him for calling the TV crew, he shook his head. “That wasn’t me,” he said. “That was Hannah.”
“Hannah?”
He nodded. “I called her, but my battery was running down. My brain was, too. I didn’t know what to do. I just yelled at her about Finkle and the car and you in the lake, and she went all quiet for a second, then said, Right, leave it to me, and the next thing I knew . . .”
The helicopter. It came so quickly, so dramatically. It was in the way, just like I was. It was impossible to ignore.
That was one thing about Hannah. She had always been good at doing what needed to be done.
The helicopter hovered over me, and someone threw down a rope. I grabbed on, and they towed me to the bank on the opposite side.
I was right in the end.
It really wasn’t that far.
“Are you ready?”
Liam nodded.
We were flat on our stomachs, hanging off the raft. Not out by the fire tree, not over the town. Just out in the middle of the lake, in the middle of nowhere.
I let it go.
The head bobbed for a second, hanging in the water as if it was making up its mind, as if it had a choice in the matter.
Then it sank. Down and down, away from the raft, away from the light.
I knew what that felt like, but I wasn’t going to reach out for it, wasn’t going to extend a stick, or a hand, to haul it back up.
I lay alongside Liam, and we didn’t speak, didn’t blink.
We watched Finkle disappear.
The Finkle head, which had sat on its plinth for less than a day before Hannah took it down. Which had sat in Dad’s studio for less than an hour while he said he didn’t know what to do with it, that he didn’t even want it for his creepy zombie garden. Which had sat in my backpack and then between us on the raft and was now sinking, down into the lake.
And I mustn’t have dropped it quite straight. I must have put a little twist on it accidentally as I let it go, because as we watched, it slowly began to rotate, spiraling its way downward and out of sight.
I looked over at Liam and grinned.
It was doing the Finkle-spin.
Out on the water, people were swimming and diving and paddling in the shadows. There were kids on rubber rings and inflatable horses. There were parents on the bank with ice chests and folding chairs.
Over at the fire tree, Amber was hauling herself down the pegs while Emily floated nearby on a hot-pink air mattress.
And coming toward us across the lake was Liam’s dad — not zigging or zagging or lifting his head to correct his course but just swimming straight for the raft in long, easy strokes.
“Your dad’s a good swimmer,” I said to Liam.
“Who do you think taught me?”
His father slowed as he neared the raft, and I inched sideways so he had space to hold on.
He would want to rest when he got here, to take a break. Even though he made it look easy, I knew he was working hard out there, invisibly, underwater.
Swimming was about staying on the surface, but sometimes to stay afloat, to keep moving, you had to figure out what was going on underneath.
Sometimes you had to dig deeper, dive down for things.
I stood up. “Coming in?”
Liam grinned.
We flattened our feet to the rough wood, pushing down for the surest footing we could find on a raft, in the middle of a lake, suspended over a drowned town.
We coiled like springs, waiting.
Then we launched ourselves — out into the sunlight. We sliced the water like butter, knifing down and down into the cool and the dark and the cold and the vast underneath.
Above us, I heard Liam’s father laughing and laughing.
It turned out you could break through the smoo
th surface of anything if you just kept pushing hard enough.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2011 by Meg McKinlay
Cover photographs: copyright © 2013 by Roine Magnusson/Getty Images (swimmers);
copyright © 2013 by P.E. Reed/Getty Images (neighborhood)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First U.S. electronic edition 2013
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2012943652
ISBN 978-0-7636-6126-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7636-6380-3 (electronic)
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