by Chloe Garner
“Wake me up when the water women show up.”
<><><>
Sam had his head back against the tree, watching the sky turn one color then another as the sun set. It would probably get cold soon, but they had agreed they’d stay through deep dark, just in case. He folded his arms across his chest, genuinely happy. Jason had quit snoring again, but it was only a matter of time until he picked up again.
The birds were getting quieter as the sun set, but the breeze had picked up and the trees shuffled and whispered all around him. He picked his head up to look at the pond again, then he saw her. He froze. Not that not moving was going to change anything. They were laying on the edge of the clearing, in plain sight, and either she had seen them or she wasn’t going to. He elbowed Jason. Jason snorted awake, and Sam gritted his teeth.
“Over there,” he whispered.
“What?” Jason asked, quiet, as his eyes scanned the far side of the pond.
“Under the willow,” Sam said.
“That’s not a water woman,” Jason said. She came and sat down next to the pond, one foot under her, one knee up in front of her, her skin tanned acorn brown and a skirt of grasses and water plants falling around her. She began to hum, barely audible.
“No, it isn’t,” Sam said. She turned her head to look at them.
“She’s really pretty,” Jason said.
She was. Almond eyes looked at them curiously from under a thick mane of almost-black hair. Sam realized that the skirt was all she was wearing. She had beautiful skin and expressive red lips that looked friendly and… sad. She wrapped her hands around her ankle, opening her mouth to sing the melody she had been humming. There were no words, just her open throat producing sweet, sad notes in the night air. Sam licked his lips.
“That’s an Iara,” he said. He looked at Jason, but his brother was no longer beside him. He stood as Jason reached the willow tree and the Iara wrapped her arms around him. They stepped back into the shade of the willow tree and Sam ran after them, knowing what he would find.
The last color was fading out of the sky as he pushed aside the drooping branches. The space was empty.
“Crap.”
<><><>
Sam knocked on Samantha’s door. She opened it.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said. She blinked.
“Where’s Jason?”
“Exactly,” he said. Swift came out of the office and waved.
“Sorry I sent you on a wild-goose thing today,” he said.
“What?” Sam asked.
“The guy with the kid. He turned up today. Turns out he’s having problems with his old lady and went out drinking instead of coming home.”
“Oh,” Sam said.
“Yeah. Sorry. Jumping at shadows, I guess,” Swift said. Sam sucked on one of his back teeth.
“Yeah, well, you were right, anyway,” he said. “It’s an Iara.”
Swift frowned.
“Where’s Jason?”
“Exactly.”
Swift snorted.
“Figures. You need help?”
“I’ll take care of it,” Sam said.
“Let me know,” Swift said. “Sorry.”
“His own dumb fault,” Sam said. Samantha stepped away from the doorway, letting Sam come in.
“Gonna clue me in?” she asked. Sam sat on a bed and rolled his jaw to one side.
“An Iara is a woman who died a widow, lonely. She’s a ghost who sticks around, taking men as her husband until someone stops her.”
“And she took Jason?”
“Yup.”
She squinted at him.
“And you’re not worried about this.”
“She took him as her husband. For ghosts, Iara have pretty corporeal bodies. He’s going to spend the next week having sex with a lonely, beautiful woman while I try to get him back. He might even be angry that I didn’t wait a bit.”
“So we have to figure out who she was?” Samantha asked. “Name her?”
He shook his head.
“Naming only works on some of the really demented ghosts. Really not many of them. No. I could go find her grave and put her bones in the lake where she lives, but that’s a lot of work and there’s no guarantee I’ll find her. Sometimes it doesn’t even work.”
“Okay,” Samantha said. “So... Okay, she’s not even evil. Is she?”
“She takes men away from their lives and holds them until they die. She’s not really bad, as far as ghosts go, but we shouldn’t just walk away, even if we could get Jason back without destroying her.”
“So how do we do that?”
Sam shrugged and sighed.
“Convince her she isn’t lonely.”
She waited and he looked up at her with a sheepish smile.
“Leave a rose for her every day for a week.”
She blinked.
“That’s… That’s actually kind of sweet.”
He shrugged.
“They aren’t violent. We’ve just got a week of hanging out in Wisconsin, leaving roses for a ghost.”
She came and sat down on the other bed, propping her feet up on the one where he sat.
“I’ve spent worse weeks.”
<><><>
Swift packed lunches for them again and Sam and Samantha drove about an hour to the nearest town with a grocer with a florist to buy a rose, then back out to the spot where they could hike to the lake.
“It’s pretty out here,” Samantha said as they walked.
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes you need space without people, you know?” she said. He nodded.
“Yeah. I do.”
“You do a lot of stuff in places like this?” she asked.
He looked at the pines, dropping his eyes back down to the faint path he was following.
“Not really. Something like this could go a hundred years and we’d never hear about it. Too remote. We tend to get sent after stuff where newspapers are covering it and people are excited about it.”
“I can’t help wanting to climb trees or go exploring,” she said. He laughed.
“We’ve got time,” he said.
They made it to the lake and he got the sandwiches out and handed her one. They sat against the same downed tree where he and Jason had spent the previous day. He chewed, looking at the trees.
“We don’t actually have to spend all day here,” he said.
“You got something better to do?” she asked.
“No. Not really.”
A while after they finished the sandwiches, she got out her blanket and spread it over the mossy grass growing next to the lake. They lay on their stomachs, watching the water.
“Can you see the fish?” she asked.
“Nope,” he said, the comfortable weight of his head on his hands keeping his jaw closed. She handed him her sunglasses, rolling onto her side to watch him. He put them on, and the reflection of the sky disappeared, leaving him looking through clear water down to silt-covered rocks. A school of fish was playing among the stones, darting one after another around crevasses. Occasionally, something would startle them and they’d turn into a proper school, darting en masse away from whatever it was that they perceived to be a threat, but eventually they’d break down into the simple, chaotic scavenging on the bottom of the lake. Samantha held her hand out and he gave her her glasses back.
“Polarized,” she said. He nodded. The world was suddenly too bright, and it took a minute for his eyes to readjust.
As the sun began to set, she retreated up the bank, seeking shade under the trees. He came to sit next to her against the downed tree again.
“She was over there,” he said, pointing at the willow.
“Will she come back again?” she asked. He shook his head.
“Probably not.”
“So why are you waiting for dusk?” she asked.
“That’s when she waits for her lover,” he said. “More likely to work that way.”
She thought for a minute a
nd nodded.
“Symbolically important.”
“Yeah.”
“So where is Jason… now. Physically?”
“I’m not sure anyone knows. Maybe under the tree somewhere.”
“People shouldn’t just be nowhere,” Samantha said. He smiled.
“Yeah.”
“I’m trusting you to know that he isn’t in trouble,” she said. He rolled his head to the side to look at her.
“You’re worried about him?”
“I’m just going to be very upset at you if it turns out you’re wrong,” she said. He grinned, looking back up at the sky.
“Not as upset as I’ll be,” he said.
“Even so.”
They sat, elbow to elbow, until the sky started to change colors, when he got up and walked around the lake to put the rose on the stone where he had first seen the Iara. Samantha was sitting up on the tree when he came back.
“So, after a week, you convince her that she isn’t alone, and she just… what?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “She stops being, I guess. She stops being an Iara. Does whatever she would have done instead, I guess.”
“Doesn’t it bother you not to know?” she asked.
“You weren’t that worried about the Nix,” he said. She smiled, looking over the water.
“I find it’s easier to let evil things get whatever fate they get. You only get upset if they don’t get punished.”
“Don’t you get just as upset if you find out that the good do get punished?” he asked. She looked at him.
“If you concede that she isn’t evil, and found out that something awful happened to her after you made her lose her grip on this world, would you reconsider sending her away?” she asked. He looked into the woods, thinking. He shook his head.
“No. She’s taking other people’s lives away from them. She may not be killing them, but she takes their lives, all the same. I didn’t cause what happened to her; I’m just keeping her from…”
“Taking other people’s free will,” she said. He nodded.
“Yeah.”
“Good answer,” she said. He grinned.
“Was it a test?”
“Right and wrong is always a test,” she said. “You only get one shot at getting it right.”
He sat down next to her.
“That’s intense.”
“That’s life,” she countered.
“You ready to head back to the car?”
“Unless you want to sleep out here.”
He looked up at the sky.
“Honestly… maybe I wouldn’t mind.”
She laughed and stood.
“We aren’t packed for it. We’d just have to hike out in the morning to get more roses.”
She waited for him and they started back toward the Cruiser.
“I wouldn’t mind either, though,” she said softly. “I like the quiet.”
<><><>
The second day, they set out earlier and bought another single rose from the grocer, as well as a selection of fruits and vegetables that Sam carried out to the lake in the shopping bag. They sat by the lake and grazed, mostly just watching and listening. Samantha napped in the sun, her face under a shirt that she seemed to have brought for specifically that purpose.
“What did she look like?” Samantha asked that afternoon. He smiled, thinking.
“Like she spent all her time outside in a world where it’s always summer,” he said. “Dark skin…” he glanced at her, picking words, “almost no clothes. Skinny, but in that way that little kids get when all they do is run around all day. Lips…” She watched him, all interest, no awkwardness. “Well, lips you’d want to kiss.”
“She’s a trap?” Samantha asked. He lay down on the blanket and put his arms under his head.
“I don’t know if someone who had known her while she was alive would recognize her,” he said. “All Iara are pretty. So are deer women, and the other ones.” She cocked her head. “It’s the same kind of ghost. They just get sorted by where they are, for whatever reason. I guess they do look different. An Iara is a water version. A deer woman is a woods version. There’s a dessert version and a seaside version… They’re all basically the same. You put their bones where they live or you leave them roses. Or another flower, sometimes. But they’re all pretty. And sad. Maybe that makes them a trap. They just want to not be alone.”
Samantha lay down next to him, the soft skin under her arm brushing against the top of his, making the hair stand on end for a moment. She shifted and the contact stopped.
“I get that,” she said. He looked at her, wondering what that meant. She turned to look at him. It might have been an invitation to ask, but he wasn’t sure. He looked up at the sky.
“I hope nothing bad is going to happen to her.”
“Yeah.”
<><><>
The fourth day, they bought sandwich meat and cheese cubes and a box of crackers. The path was getting easier to find. They sat next to the lake, Samantha leaning against Sam’s back.
“Does it feel like we’re the only ones who have ever been here?” she asked. He turned his head to look out over the water, and she tipped her head back to rest on his shoulder.
“More than that,” he said. “It feels like we’re the only people anywhere.”
“It does.”
She was quiet for a while.
“You read?” she asked.
“When I can,” he said. “Not a lot, any more. I did a lot as a kid.”
“You ever read a story about hobbits? Little people who lived in holes in the ground?”
He laughed.
“I remember it. One of my favorites.”
“It’s like that,” she said. “Like, if I turn my head fast enough, I’ll see a hobbit hole, just over there. Clean. Quiet. No reason to ever go anywhere else.”
“Except to get more crackers,” Sam said.
“Except to get more crackers.”
“Are you really going to let us leave you in New York?” Sam asked. She dropped her head back against his shoulder again, and he slouched down to rest his head on her shoulder, and they sat, staring up at the sky for a minute.
“I have every intention of letting you leave, if we get to New York,” she said.
“You’d just give up like that?”
“If we get there, it won’t be giving up. It will be going along with what I’m supposed to be doing in the first place.”
“What’s that?” he asked. She sighed.
“I’ve been running away for a long time. You mind if we don’t talk about it?”
“That’s fine. Why do you want to come with us, then?”
She turned her head, so that her cheekbone touched his. He nearly jerked away.
“Doesn’t it feel like I’m supposed to be here?”
He closed his eyes. It felt like maybe he should give Jason a few more weeks with the Iara, and just sit here all day with Samantha.
“I guess so.”
She laughed.
“Well, it does to me.” She sat up and rolled onto her stomach to pick grass and look at the lake. “I’ve been running away for so long. I decided a little while ago that it was time to figure out if I was going to run away for good or go back.”
“What does running away for good look like?” he asked, putting his hand down behind him and looking at her. She threw another piece of grass.
“Finding a new life.”
He wondered what her old life had been.
“What would you do?”
“Dunno. I studied engineering for a while. Was going to be a programmer. Maybe go finish that.”
“Why did you quit?”
She looked up at him, cloudless blue sky reflected in her sunglasses.
“Life happened.”
“Yeah. It does that.”
She nodded and looked back over the water.
“Hey, Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“You want t
o get a tent and a cooler and just… stay out here tomorrow and the next day?”
“Yeah.”
She threw another piece of grass.
“Okay.”
<><><>
So they did. She bought three gallons of water, insisting that they shouldn’t have too little, and they bought bags of food, more than they would have eaten in a full week, and the rest of the roses. She found a little plastic vase and they bought that to put the roses in.
“We couldn’t do this before, because I wasn’t sure the roses would make it,” she said.
Sam realized as they hiked back out to the lake that he hadn’t given any real thought to wildlife. Samantha was armed and so was he - he carried a handgun everywhere, no matter what, and he had a hunting knife on his hip for being out in the woods - but they hadn’t even considered being careful or guarded. They got to the lake and set up the tent, stashing the food and a roll of blankets they had stolen from the motel that morning inside of it, and sat down on the grassy bank and it just felt like nothing menacing would dare infringe on the space.
They lay shoulder to shoulder, she handing him her sunglasses once to point out a particularly large fish - then lay on their backs and stared at the sky, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, knee to knee. An eagle flew overhead.
“If you had a super power, what would it be?” she asked. He snorted.
“Yours would be flying?” he asked.
“It’s a good choice, is all,” she said. “When I was younger, I would have picked perfect recall, then flight, then breathing underwater.”
“You afraid of drowning?” he asked. She shook her head.
“Wanted to be a mermaid.”
“Mermaids are evil,” he said. She snorted.
“Get out.”
“They are. What would you pick now?”
“Flight is still a good choice. Perfect recall is good, too. I still want to be a mermaid, evil or not. But what I’d choose now would be the ability to teleport.”
“Blinking,” Sam said. “Ghosts do it.”
“Do they?”
“Yeah.”
“What would you pick?”
“I like all of yours. I guess I never really thought about breathing underwater. But… I don’t know. I think I’d choose telepathy.”
She scooted away and rolled on her side.
“Why?”
“Twin thing, maybe? Jason and I always had this… thing, where it doesn’t really matter what words we use, the other one gets it. Feels like telepathy. I think I’d like to be able to really do it. Would make my life easier.”
