Lake People

by Abi Maxwell

  But for Clara, more than the van existed at that moment. Paul was already running toward the path to the beach, but when Clara looked up she saw it, that slick black back of a whale. Upward it rose, slowly and smoothly as though it were a hand attached to the underwater clock that made the world itself move on. Clara watched it fall back in and rise again. Over and over again that whale rose and fell and how could she ever explain to Paul that it was for that vision that she did not move? That she had known he was headed toward the beach but she had also believed that what had happened had happened, but that here was her chance alone to watch a great old being rise from the depths of the earth?

  He screamed her name as he went. He needed her help. He was a large, strong man, but they both knew that she was the stronger swimmer. She did run to help him, but by the time she got to the beach he was already in the water. She did not go in after him. She had no faith that anything could be done. For even then, just minutes after it had happened, it seemed clear to her: a whale had entered this cruel and beautiful world at the precise time that her infant had exited it. It was not a belief that would quell the sorrow but it was a belief that might add some order to the mystery.

  Underwater, the van wasn’t hard to find. Like a puzzle piece it had fit itself in between two boulders. Its nose faced upward and its tail end rested upon the sandy ocean floor. Paul found it quickly. The tide was coming in but he must have felt stronger than the force of the entire ocean. The windows were up and the doors were shut. Clara could imagine his time under that water. She could see seaweed long and thick as trees in a rainforest, and she could see that van lit up, glowing with the life of her daughter inside. She could see her Paul taking one breath to inspect his options, and then one more to dive under and rescue the baby. She could see him as an adept explorer in the cold ocean. But none of that could possibly be true. Aside from the terror, it must have been dark and it must have been sheer luck that led his hand to the door of the van, and led him to the crib where his baby lay, her back against the bars, grasping desperately upward.

  She was okay. Miraculously she was. He came up with her in his arms and he tapped her back. Her skin had turned a little blue but she coughed and she did not cry but she did breathe; she breathed fine then and she still does today. It must have been five minutes that she was under the water. They would never know. It could have been less and it could have been more but anyway Clara’s husband had the baby in his arms and he walked right past Clara on the beach. The few other people in that cove were on the beach now, too, though neither Clara nor Paul realized it. Paul walked up the hill to the shack where the owner of the campground stayed, but he wasn’t there so he walked to the man’s truck and started it. Clara got in and for nearly six hours they rode in silence to the nearest hospital. Paul would not hand the baby over. He had wrapped her in Clara’s sweater and now he kept her on his lap, and stopped every half hour or so to hold her against his chest. How Clara would have liked to be held like that. But she knew then that never again would her Paul come back to her. Her fault this time had been too great.

  Crossing

  1971 & 1994

  I WAS WITH my father when I first crossed the bridge to King’s Point. I was twelve and we were to attend a party of some distant relatives whom I had never met before. Up we went to the peak of the bridge, and for a moment all earth was shielded from us, nothing remaining but endless sky and lake. Right then I imagined a body launching itself over the edge and going onward, unleashed from this weighted life. But the truck crested the hill and we descended.

  King’s Point is just a mile from the Kettleborough Pier, and beneath the bridge a narrow strip of rocks connects it to mainland. But more often than not, those rocks are covered with water, so in truth King’s is more of an island than a point. I had heard that famous people lived out there, actors and politicians. Their houses dotted the edge, while the center of the point remained a mass of thick pine. There was—and still is—only one road, which circled the perimeter and dropped sharply to the mansions and lake. Each mansion was numbered and the house we were headed for was 24. It wasn’t hard to locate—its mailbox was roughly the size of my own closet. The house itself was not visible from the road, but when the car dropped down the drive that grand white house rose up as though straight out of the water. It was the stuff of movies, with white pillars on the porch and stone statues in the yard, laughter rolling off the granite floors and into the lush green grass.

  My father climbed out of the truck and walked right to the door and opened it up and went in as though he had been in a place like this a thousand times before. I clung at his back. We entered a drawing room that our own house could fit into. There were maybe twenty people in there. From that wide, echo-filled room three stairs rose to an open kitchen. All of this was granite, save for the three-basin sink, which was metal. The adults clanked their glasses and tossed back their heads, and it wasn’t long until my father joined right in, though it was clear even to my childhood self that he was of another breed entirely.

  “Don’t you look like Paul Newman,” one woman said to him.

  “Aren’t you a bowl of chocolate chips.”

  “Don’t you look like Robert Redford.” Devnet’s mother said that.

  Devnet is where the story begins. I was promptly introduced to her, as she and her younger brother, Thomas, were the only other children there. They were staying at this house—owned by their grandparents—for the entire summer.

  “Preteen,” Devnet called me after our introduction. She was thirteen and as she told me this she sighed and put an exasperated hand to her forehead and said, “Oh, Alice, it’s all about to start happening to you. Love, ache, lies, the works.” The way she said that word, ache, it did indeed sound just barely out of my reach. Devnet, too, the name itself. It sounded womanly and I asked her where it came from.

  “I’m named after my parents’ dead baby,” she told me. Then she moved behind me, boldly grabbed my waist, and steered me to her bedroom. There were bunk beds there, and Devnet climbed up to the top and instructed me to join her. Her brother, when he appeared, was ordered to remain on the floor.

  “Today we saw the monster of the lake,” he called to me.

  “Hush up,” Devnet said. She crossed her legs, asked me what I liked to do, and listlessly spoke of the woes of teenage life.

  “First we saw the shadow and then it flighted away,” Thomas said.

  I told Devnet that I liked to ski. She scoffed at this, and once again reminded me that it was all about to start happening. And then to her brother, “Scat,” she said, “skedaddle.” He did, and Devnet went on with her lecture, though I was much more interested in the monster, who had the reputation of appearing just before trouble.

  “The gnomes are coming, Alice!” Thomas called from the hallway. “The giants are coming!”

  “I’m thirteen and already life has become too much,” Devnet said. She lay back against the pillow with one arm thrown languidly upward. I said I had to use the bathroom—a fib—and climbed off that bed. I let Thomas lead me to my next adventure, which he discovered when he opened the refrigerator door. There were lobsters in there, at least twenty of the faintly blue beasts. When we moved those thick plastic bags of them to the counter it wasn’t but a minute before every single lobster began violently to thrash for life.

  “We’ve got to save them,” Thomas said with conviction. Panicked, I plugged up the metal sink and filled it with cold water. Thomas reached over and dumped an entire canister of salt in. In a soft and urgent voice he spoke to them, said, “There now, you little cloppers. Now we’ll get you to the ocean, there, now you can swim free.”

  “If it weren’t for the rest of the world I would not eat you,” I whispered as those sad, maroon beings began to slow their hold on life. “I’ve got to fit in, don’t I?”

  Devnet found me quickly enough. She pulled me away from the sink, saying that her father wanted us to run to the store with him. And what would
have happened, had I not done that?

  “He says my stupid mother forgot the corn,” she said.

  I had no mother, and wanted one desperately, so I was shocked to hear Devnet speak of her own mother in such a way. She pushed me out the door. Dusk had just begun to fall. Devnet’s father was already in the driver’s seat. I had not told my father I was going but I got in without protest. On the way to the store, her father had her take the wheel so he could remove his jacket, and once that was off he tipped his seat back a bit and told her to keep steering us the whole way there. This frightened me, and I sat straight-backed in the seat, preparing my arms and legs for the event of a crash, laboring over whether or not to speak up for my own safety. But we made it to the store just fine, and Devnet’s father sent her in with a twenty-dollar bill. That stretch of time when he and I sat silent in the car together, what an assaulting fear it filled me with. His breath was slow and heavy, and now and then his eyes—which were dark and lovely; he was a remarkably attractive man—would catch me in the rearview mirror and just hold me there. I had a strange sense that he would start the car and drive me away, take me as his unwilling lover. Finally Devnet reappeared. She was wearing blue-jean cutoff shorts with a bathing suit underneath—I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed this before or why I noticed it now. But I did, and as she walked across the pavement to the black car with that large bag of corn, she just looked so skinny and helpless that for a moment I became certain in a very unchildlike way that I would fare better than she in this short life. She thrust the corn into the backseat. She was allowed to steer again on the way back to the mansion, and this time I wasn’t afraid, though I should have been.

  As we turned from mainland to cross over, I caught sight of a man walking onto the bridge, heading our way. Then I looked toward the lake just as a red-tailed hawk, wings expanded, dove from a tree to float on a wave of sky. Only when the car thumped and I plunged forward against the back of the driver’s seat did I lose sight of that hawk. We had hit it, I thought suddenly. But then I looked out the window to see that instead of a hawk, the body of the man we had hit flew over the edge of the bridge. How he soared, suspended on an invisible ledge of air. When he dropped it was sudden—that air just let go. He hit the water and, seamlessly as a maple’s leaves turning, the lake transformed to a pool of red around him.

  Devnet began to scream, though it seemed not out of horror but out of incredulousness. “That man jumped in front of us,” she said a few times. “That man jumped in front of us!” Then her statement matured.

  “That man just committed suicide!” As she repeated this her head darted back and forth—she seemed to think there was a crowd of people about her, all waiting for an explanation.

  “But—” I began, quietly, but Devnet spun around in her seat.

  “Shut up,” she said. She reached for my collar and grabbed hold, clenching her teeth. “You’re the one who’s not even really a part of our family, so you just shut up. I know where you really come from. You just shut up.”

  We were entirely righted on the bridge, just at the crest, so that all we could see ahead was that great expanse of dim purple sky, another world entirely. I didn’t know what she meant. Her words just entered me, steady and vacant. Within a week they would make a home. For now I simply noticed how well dressed Devnet’s father was. He took up the linen blazer, which earlier he had removed, and from his pocket withdrew a flask.

  “Drink,” he said, and turned in his seat to face me. I did, one gulp. It was brandy, and to this day even the scent turns me nauseous.

  “Don’t you say a word,” he said. He was remarkably serene. He had done this many times, it seemed that way. “This will calm you down,” he said, meaning the liquor. “You say a word it’s jail for all of us.” That calm voice, he could have been suggesting what we might have for dinner or what game we might play.

  “That man committed suicide!” Devnet screamed again.

  “It’s true,” her father said to her. Then he turned to me. “If you open your fat mouth,” he said, “then you and your father will be dead.”

  “That’s true, too,” Devnet said. “I seen him kill before, my father’s serious.”

  He whipped around then and smacked Devnet hard across the face. Her hand went to where he had hit, but she didn’t so much as shudder.

  Why didn’t I jump out of the car, swim to that floating man? He could have been alive. I knew how to swim. I couldn’t have saved him but surely to try would have said something about my character.

  By now that man, George Collins, twenty years old, had disappeared. But he would be found soon enough, caught in the twisted roots of the large pine that reached over the bank, into the water. It was the same tree that hawk had soared from, and it still stands today. Devnet’s father eased us down the bridge and pulled off to the side. He handed Devnet his flask and a full bottle that he pulled from beneath his seat, and told her to empty them both in the lake, fill them with water, and come dump them over the front of the car.

  “Anyone drives by while you’re down there, you jump right in the lake. Car comes while you’re up here, you pour that water over your head and make a show of cooling off.”

  Devnet seemed sickeningly pleased with her role. As I sat in the back and let her father continue his slow, firm threats, one hand holding so tight to my thigh that I had blotches of yellow and purple skin for months to come, I watched Devnet complete her task with efficiency.

  By the time we got back to the house it seemed that Devnet and her father had already forgotten. They hulled the corn together and put it on to steam, an exemplary father-daughter pair. My father stood in the corner, sipping on a beer. I went to him, stood at his side. Had he thought to ask me if I was all right, how the drive went, any such thing, I would have fallen open. As it was he said nothing and shortly we were in line for our lobsters. I was last in line, and by the time my plate was made everyone else was seated at the dining table, which was in that large room that was open to the kitchen but three steps down. At the top of the steps I stood, quivering, that poor dead bug on my plate. As I inched forward to take my first step, the lobster slid off and dropped to the floor.

  Devnet, seeing my misfortune, announced with glee to the table, “Alice is a preteen.”

  To this the women erupted in drunken laughter while I stood there alone with my secret knowledge that a man had just exited this strange life forever. Sweet Thomas came to my rescue. He is a doctor now. (“Can you believe it?” Devnet recently said upon telling me that.) He jumped out of his chair and exclaimed that he would save the lobster. Across the floor he crawled, and picked the dead lobster up, spoke to it, said, “There, you little jumping clopper,” and firmly placed it on my plate, then took my arm and walked me to my seat.

  As we headed home, I rehearsed in my mind the way I would tell my father all that had happened. The man, the accident, and those words Devnet had said to me. But all I could get out was, “If a man told you to keep a secret or he’d kill your family, and he’d killed someone before, would you keep the secret?”

  Maybe he was drunk, or tired. “Yes,” he said without interest, and turned the country station up. Then, as we lowered ourselves toward mainland, my father saw something bobbing in the water.

  “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” he said.

  It was my father who went to the police, only after he’d gone into the water and dragged that poor lifeless body out. The headlights of my father’s truck—just replaced that Saturday afternoon—were what lit that man up like an elevated ghost. The man was young; I could see that when he was upon the shore and my father had a flashlight on him. Dressed in a white shirt with a small, waterlogged notebook in his breast pocket. In the days to follow, everyone attributed my strange behavior to the fact that I’d seen a dead body. I had crossed a threshold, as Devnet had said I would.

  Of course I thought of Devnet over the years. She, and not her father or young and dead George Collins, stood at the center o
f the awful night. So small and young, she seemed to have manipulated that entire episode and then just as quickly returned to her regular life. But I did not think of her in any tangible way. I did not say her name—not until the night this year when my husband and I went to the bad Mexican restaurant over on the pier. It’s the only place open through winter. Summer you can get your picture taken in the booth and drive a bumper car, even take a train ride the three hundred miles around the lake. But darkness and cold set in and all you can get down there is a plate of greasy beans and cheese along with a margarita, which we like to do now and then just to get out of the house. My husband had three drinks that night. We sat at the bar and spoke to a man who believed he was a sailor just headed out on the big lake for his winter’s catch. He looked the part, too, a gray beard and those remotely focused eyes, a bit of a limp. But of course the lake had been frozen for months. I didn’t bother to say as much and nor did my gentle husband, which reminded me of why I had chosen him so many years ago. The man showed us his black tooth, said it was made of pure iron. Seeing that, my husband asked how it happened, and the man put his hand on my shoulder and gave a little wink and said, “We alls got secrets, doesn’t we?”

  My husband put his arm around me just then, pulled me toward him and laughed a bit. He was claiming me. No, he was saying. My sweet Alice don’t have no secrets.

  By the time we left the iron-toothed sailor, the snow had turned our small world to a plate of clouds. We cut easily through what had accumulated, which was at least an inch, and as my husband drove I watched our path in the rearview mirror. The tracks could have been those of a horse-drawn carriage, so silent they looked, and so quickly covered. When I looked ahead again we were about to pass the bridge to the point. This year there had been another accident on that bridge. The arch of it is so steep that it’s like a jump, and if your car is moving fast enough it can catch a bit of air at the top. For generations teenagers have loved to press the gas to the floor and try to launch themselves in this way. This time the wheel got turned in the air, and those kids flew right over the side. They landed in the water and swam up one friend short. At the courthouse girls cried on the stands and their boyfriends shook but no one would say who’d been driving. I went to the hearings, every one of them, for I am a newspaper reporter. But I had not been over that bridge since childhood. Now I asked my husband to turn. He switched on that even-beating blinker and over we went.