The way to the lake was not long. Now, it was almost silent, few birds and only the enormous sound of her shoes cracking and breaking the twigs and branches littering the forest floor.
The lake was completely placid, only the slightest of movement of the water against the land. The shore had revealed itself again, now dotted with exposed driftwood, still black and slippery. She crouched down by the water and let it wash across her hands. She buried her fingers in the sand, pushing her hand down into the muck as far as it would go. She pushed her hand until she couldn’t push anymore, until she hit rock or something submerged.
She imagined that she was touching the bedrock of the town, a piece of rock extending from the edges of Keno to the Painted Hills, a plate of rock that everybody lived on, sending down the small vibrations of their feet to mingle with the larger rumblings of semi-trucks and cars and four-wheelers and the even louder pounding of earth moving equipment tearing up chunks of red dirt and constellations of root.
Her hand in the sand was so cold, she could no longer feel the rock below her fingertips. She eased her hand out and washed it clean in the lake while looking out at that calm expanse. The broken trees that had once stuck out had been cleared away by the flood. The lake looked normal, now, like a place you could safely dive into.
This wasn’t true, though. She’d read the paper that morning, which had reported that the bodies and caskets washed up had been re-buried, though there was no way of knowing who they had been. The trees were cleared away, but the report claimed that only a fraction of the coffins had come up. When they’d dragged the lake for Levi Richardson’s body (never found), divers had found other remains, submerged in the mud, as well as remnants of houses and even cars, rusted and in pieces but still there at the bottom. They could always come up again.
Connie had packed her clothes and brought her paper-bag covered schoolbooks back to Heartshorne High. She’d left them stacked outside of the office in a grocery bag. She had not bothered to say goodbye to any of her teachers once her mother told her about their decision. She had told some friends goodbye, but few, since she’d lost track of them in her weeks away from school, and more importantly, had lost interest in them. They were so young. Now, the relationships she had cared so much about seemed petty. She could feel, even before her parents had formally announced it, that she wasn’t meant to stay in Heartshorne much longer. She’d been disconnecting herself already. The few girls who came over seemed to want nothing more than to gossip. They wanted her to give them details about where she had been, about what had happened to her, and tried to lure it out of her by telling her the rumors.
We heard that somebody kept you captive, they said, and that you remember bits and pieces. Is it true?
She would only shake her head. I don’t remember anything. It’s like on some nights when you are so tired that you fall right asleep without remembering anything and then open your eyes and are awake and can’t remember sleeping. That’s how it feels. Just a big blank.
This was completely opposite to the truth, which was somehow easier than making up a more plausible lie. This was how she wished it had been, at least. A big blank.
After she had finished packing most of her books and clothes, her radio and records, she walked to the lake. She reached the edge of the lake, at the spot where she and her brothers and sisters had played as children. It was still a parking place, where teenagers came to make out, the grass dead and pressed down into the car tracks, but the town had set up a picnic table and a trash can which was never changed, so the trash overflowed the can and scattered on the ground around it. She sat down on the dry ground and took her socks and shoes off.
She had once imagined that she would always live here. She thought she would be like her teachers or her friends’ mothers or her own mother—a husband amongst the young men at school and, eventually, children and a job watching or teaching children (these were the only jobs that women had, as far as she knew, and though she didn’t much like children, she thought that this was where she would work, too) or no job at all except for a house and a family to keep her busy. Like her mother, she might spend her days doing laundry and cooking and cleaning all day, waiting for everyone to come home and undo it all, and then do it all again before bed.
She stepped into the water with her bare feet, letting the lake mud squish between her toes. Usually, she ran out to the rocky point in the water, hating that soft, squelching feeling under her feet, but now she figured she should sit here and take it—it was her last time here, probably, and it couldn’t hurt. She let her feet sink down into the mud until she could only see the beginning of were her foot sloped down from her ankle. She closed her eyes.
She took a piece of paper from her pocket. On it, she had written two sentences. She read them again, pleased with their finality. The lake was the one thing gave Heartshorne its borders: it was a big, watery limit, a body that almost everyone in the town had entered. It struck her as funny, the phrase body of water. They had all joined with it at some point, leaving behind their skin and hair and other bodily fluids. The lake held as much of them as anywhere else. It seemed the right place to leave her resolutions. She had to close the place up behind her.
That way, she could leave, and the past could close up behind her like a zipper. She touched the surface of the words, slightly raised from the lead of her pencil:
I will never tell the truth about James.
I will never come back here.
She took the pages, her words printed on them in bold, and ripped it up, slicing her sentences in half, and then the words in half, and then each strip and piece of paper in half until she had tiny pieces of confetti. She threw them into the lake, where they grew wet and dark and disappeared.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Infinite thanks to everyone at Dark House Press, particularly Richard Thomas, Carrie Gaffney, Jacob Knabb, and Victor David Giron. I can’t thank you all enough for getting behind this novel.
Thank you to Alban Fischer, cover designer, and Helena Kvarnström, for providing the amazing cover photograph.
Thanks always to my dear friend Kyle Minor.
Shout out the Tel Aviv Writer’s group, who warmly welcomed a bewildered newcomer to Israel to the group and saw early drafts of this novel. In particular, thanks to Naomi, Alex, Kate, Greg, Anna, and Alona. I know I’m forgetting a few others!
Thanks to Michelle Herman, who first encouraged my prose writing.
Thanks to MacDowell Colony & Vermont Studio Center for the solitude and the good meals.
Thanks to Chris Wells & K.D. Lovgren, two excellent readers, writers, and friends.
Thanks to the McMurrian/Strange/Trent clan for my yearly dose of Oklahoma and tales of Sardis Lake and local murder.
Lastly, thanks to Zach Trent, for being the most supportive and loving person I’ve ever known.
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