Beneath the Lake Page 23

  ‘I had to get us away. Off the beach first, then down the road. Step by step. I told myself we could at least make it to a motel, the next town, and piece by piece we got free of it. We drove all morning and shut ourselves in the house for the rest of the summer.

  ‘The main concern was, still is, that all those paths we glimpsed reached their own end, hitting a solid wall in time. We all saw the end of every possibility. That end-time was this summer. Why show us so many possibilities with that one common trait? Was it not reasonable to assume that all were possible but ultimately finite? The implications have shaped the lives we have led. My drive in business. Leonard’s risk-taking and addictions. Your mother’s quest for quack cures. As if we were hoping to outrun the inevitable. After decades of failing to find any helpful answers, we had no choice but to conclude that, however we conducted our lives, this summer was to be the end of… all possibilities.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Megan whispers, and Ray’s arms crawl with gooseflesh.

  ‘What I said this morning over brunch, the purpose for our trip – I thought I was saving our lives. I thought if only we could somehow atone for the part we played… for covering it up… somehow find peace with ourselves. Open the door once more, find the meaning behind it all. But that was before the cars. The phones. Leonard. Nothing is working, you see? I no longer believe it is by our own free will we are seated here tonight. We have no way out but our own two feet, and we will try. But I am certain… the lake, yes, the lake will do everything in its power to keep us here.’

  Ray’s tongue feels thick, his brain revolving inside his skull. The old man is joking. Telling Boy Scout ghost stories around the campfire to give them a thrill before packing everyone off to sleep. Trying to teach his family to stop wasting their lives. Any moment now, good old fat middle-aged Leonard is going to spring out of the trees with a skin of antlers on his head and yell boo!

  ‘We’re not going home?’ Ray says, pleading with his father to answer the only way a father ever should answer his children. ‘You think we’re going to die here?’

  Warren’s eyes are pooled with regret, the way his mother’s were earlier that day. Ray understands that his mother knows, too. She has been trying to make her peace with it, and living with such knowledge has ruined her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Warren says. ‘It’s only a matter of time.’

  Splitting the Herd

  They fall into arguing and shouting immediately, and as a result no one hears Sierra until it’s too late.

  Colt is busy ranting about Leonard. Megan accuses Warren of harboring suicidal tendencies and a power complex. Warren defends himself with a convoluted series of apologies and disclaimers. They’re half drunk and acting like a bunch of disorderly airplane passengers, and Ray knows if they don’t pull it together and form some kind of serious plan to get out of here, more bad things are going to happen.

  ‘He’s not GOD!’ Ray finally shouts.

  To his surprise, they all shut up. Cheeks tear-stained, eyes bloodshot from smoke and liquor, they turn on him, awaiting his command, a glimmer of hope. He just reminded them Warren is not in charge, and in doing so nominated himself for the remainder of the campaign.

  ‘Whatever the hell you all think you saw that night,’ Ray says, ‘none of it matters. We need to find a way out. Our fates are not decided. Someone tells me I’m going to die here, there, anywhere, anytime – I don’t care who it is – Dad, God, a team of doctors at my bedside in the hospital, showing me MRIs of the tumors – fuck that, and fuck them. I decide. And I didn’t come all the way out here to commit suicide by surrendering to crackpot ideas about fate and time and the magical mystery thing in the lake. I love you all, but I have to say, I’m shocked at, no, I am sickened by…’

  Ray pauses for breath, and in the silence they finally hear her. The little girl’s cries inside the Airstream shift into something more than post-nap crankiness. She is actively screaming.

  ‘Who is that?’ Warren says.

  Megan is staring at the trailer, eyes wide, as if the door is going to open again, this time disgorging something far worse than Grandma Mercer. A little Blundstone version of the Loch Ness Monster perhaps.

  ‘Sierra!’ Colt yells, stumbling to the door.

  It’s going to be locked, Ray thinks, but a second later Colt is throwing the door open, stepping up into the cabin. Talking over the child’s wailing.

  ‘Honey? Sierra, what’s wrong? Calm down, baby. Calm…’

  Sierra’s crying becomes a series of whoops and relieved mewling. Warren heads after them, taking the first two steps and disappearing into the silver shell.

  ‘She what?’ his father says. Then, ‘Francine? Franny!’

  More mumbling, then Colt says, ‘She doesn’t know. You’re scaring her!’

  ‘You said she couldn’t walk!’ Warren yells.

  ‘She walked today!’

  Ray steps up into the trailer, entering the fray. Even in the dark, with only a small overhead light to give him a snapshot of the trailer’s interior, he is struck by this recent feat of travel engineering his father has managed. Warren has outfitted, stocked and jerry-rigged every single inch of available wall and counter space with food, equipment, tools, household utensils, flashlights, spare batteries, knives, nets, shelves, pouches and pockets, radio equipment, condiments, hoses, solar panels, compasses, digital weather meters – there are blinking lights and watches and more knives and fishing rods velcroed to the ceiling, for God’s sake. It is as though NASA was tasked with cramming a hardware store, sporting goods store, and twenty or so items from every aisle in the supermarket into a single eight- by sixteen-foot space, and succeeded.

  This isn’t preparation, Ray has time to think, before he notices the window and its missing screen. This is hoarding, OCD, and survivalist paranoia gone haywire all rolled into one. My father’s last stand against the death he perceives to be headed his way, and ours.

  ‘Your mother’s gone,’ Warren says, eyes glassing up. ‘She was just…’

  The window over the dining table and bench seat is a hole, the dark brown cliff nearly abutting the backside of the trailer now unobstructed and within arm’s reach. The blinds have been torn down. The twisted frame of the window screen is dangling by the last two inches of its rubber gasket. Ray is finding it difficult in the extreme to imagine his mother’s hips wiggling through the tight space, which seems barely wide enough for Sierra to slide through.

  ‘That wasn’t Mom,’ Ray says.

  ‘FRANNY!’ Warren bellows, shoving his way past Ray and out of the trailer. ‘Oh God, not my wife! Franny!’

  ‘She didn’t see anything?’ Ray asks Colt, who is backed into the rear foldout bed with her daughter standing between her legs.

  Sierra is sucking her thumb, staring up at Uncle Ray like he is going to send her to a time out.

  ‘She just woke up,’ Colt says. Her hands are white with tension on her daughter’s shoulders. ‘She said “the lake take Fa-Fa away”.’

  Ray blinks at his sister several times. Fa-Fa? That’s what you get when you combine Francine and Grandma, he supposes. He walks a couple steps and crouches in front of his niece, working up a big smile, hoping she doesn’t smell the pint of gin rolling around in his stomach.

  ‘Hey, baby. Remember your Uncle Ray?’

  Sierra nods but continues sucking her thumb as if working to take the rest of her hand with it.

  ‘You saw the lake? What did it look like? Can you tell me?’

  Sierra doesn’t respond.

  ‘It’s okay, sweetie. You can tell me. I’m gonna find Fa-Fa, I promise. But it would help to know what it looked like.’ He turns and points up at the window. ‘Did you see it come through there?’

  Sierra allows a tiny nod.

  Ray keeps the smile going. ‘That’s kinda funny, isn’t it? A whole lake coming through that little window. Wow, huh?’

  The thumb comes out with the pop of a wine cork. ‘Not the real lake, yo
u dummy.’

  Ray makes a funny-crazy face, sticks his tongue out. ‘That’s Uncle Ray. He has caramel corn for brains, and sometimes, when he’s had too many bowls of Rice Krispies, he forgets how to tie his shoes.’

  Sierra isn’t laughing, but there is light in her eyes. Her chest is puffed up as if holding her breath with delight.

  ‘Of course it wasn’t the real lake,’ he says, slapping himself on the forehead. ‘Hey, owie, that hurt.’

  Sierra chuckles. ‘You hit yourself.’

  ‘Yep, I’m a real donkey butt.’ Then, quickly, before the mood can shift once more, Ray says, ‘Now tell Uncle Ray what the little lake in the window looked like, pretty please with caramel corn on top?’ He slaps his head once more for effect.

  Sierra rushes into his arms and whispers. ‘White light. Like the magic wand.’

  ‘Really?’ Ray whispers back. ‘That sounds kinda neat.’

  ‘It was neat, until it got Fa-Fa,’ Sierra says, pulling away, her smile vanishing. ‘Then I didn’t like it. I hated it.’

  ‘Okay, baby, don’t worry. I’ll make sure it doesn’t come back.’ Ray stands, looks Colt in the eyes. ‘Magic wand?’

  ‘It’s my favorite movie,’ Sierra adds.

  ‘Favorite movie?’ he asks the two of them.

  Sierra’s thumb has gone back into her mouth.

  He nods at Colt: well?

  ‘I don’t know. She has all the DVDs. Probably one of the animated ones.’

  Still smiling, Ray says, ‘Come on, Mom, you can do better than that.’

  ‘Not right now, Uncle,’ Colt snaps. ‘My mind’s a little preoccupied lately. Jesus.’

  ‘All right. How about lately? Something in the car on the way out here?’

  ‘Tinker Bell!’ Sierra exclaims.

  ‘Peter Pan, that’s it,’ her mother adds.

  Peter Pan. Tinker Bell. Magic wand. Okay, didn’t Tinker Bell’s wand shoot magic light or dust or something? Don’t they all? Ray can’t remember much about Peter Pan, it was never one of his favorites, but here we go.

  ‘What does Tinker Bell’s magic wand do?’

  Colt rolls her hand impatiently. ‘Brings them to life. Makes them fly, is that right, honey?’

  Sierra nods.

  Ray can’t bring himself to ask his niece if some kind of fairy appeared, threw a little magic gold dust into the camper, and Fa-Fa flew out the window. The broken screen would indicate something less than a magical departure, not quite Peter and Wendy and that little one with his teddy bear lifting off in a happy string. But in the end, does it matter? Ray’s Mom is gone. Sierra saw something take her.

  ‘Honey? Was anybody with the magic wand? Someone like Tinker Bell? Or Peter Pan? Any person?’

  ‘Nu-uh.’

  ‘Just the magic light? Gold or white light?’

  Sierra nods repeatedly.

  ‘Well, this had been very helpful,’ he tells Colt. ‘Thank you, Sierra.’

  Ray is out the door and on his way to help find Fa-Fa, but already another worrisome question has presented itself in his mind. Why would the girl equate white light from a magic wand with the lake? Only one reason Ray can figure – Megan’s white people. Down by the lake, in the lake, last night or this morning, it doesn’t really matter.

  What matters is, Sierra has seen them before.

  Ray and Megan catch up with Warren less than halfway through the clearing, sitting in the sand, shoes off, rubbing his left foot and pulling his toes toward his kneecap as if trying to relieve a nasty cramp.

  ‘Dad, what happened?’ Ray asks. When Warren doesn’t answer. ‘You come barreling out here without a flashlight? You want to get lost, or worse?’

  ‘She may have been missing for hours,’ Warren says, defensive and chastened. And Ray doesn’t like that, because it’s quite a drop from the man out on the beach today, the swashbuckling pirate in search of his anchor.

  ‘You’re staying back at the trailer with Colt and Sierra. They need you,’ Ray says, empowered now that his dad is down with a bum wheel. ‘Megan and I can move faster. I have your old spotlight in the Bronco. We can cover a lot of beach with that’

  ‘Twenty minutes she’s been gone, at least,’ Warren says, shoving himself to his feet, wincing as his weight settles on the left foot. His legs seem too thin, bandy, the shins brittle. ‘Maybe an hour. She could be anywhere.’

  For the first time, Ray sees age in his father, and it’s not the ankle injury. His skin looks too dry. His hands shake. The eyes in their sad pouches are darting about, looking for something solid to hold on to. The old man is actually an old man now, he thinks, panged with regret over the years wasted.

  ‘Easy, easy,’ Ray says, reaching to steady him.

  ‘I can walk,’ Warren growls.

  ‘You should wrap that in some ice,’ Megan says. ‘Elevate it.’

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ Warren says. ‘I was a medic in Vietnam.’

  ‘You never told me that,’ Ray says.

  ‘Well, my unit spent enough time with the medics. Usually getting sewn up. And then one day the medic assigned to our platoon got his guts blown out, so for the next thirty-four days we had to take turns. Believe me, I picked up a few things.’

  ‘Wait!’ Colt says, materializing from the bushes with Sierra in her arms. ‘You can’t leave us here.’

  ‘We’re not,’ Ray says. ‘Dad’s coming back with you.’

  ‘What happened to your leg?’

  Warren opens his mouth in protest, but something about the sight of Sierra in Colt’s arms gives him pause. ‘Okay, here’s the deal. Megan can stay with us in the trailer. Colt, you go with your brother.’

  ‘What?’ Ray sees no logic in this.

  ‘It’s the safest way.’

  To say that Megan looks uneasy about the prospect of staying behind, locked in the trailer with the man who less than an hour ago proclaimed they were all going to die here, would be an understatement.

  ‘Think about it,’ Warren says. ‘You two are the only ones who weren’t a part of that night. You were there, but you didn’t go in the water. You didn’t see the things we did. Come into contact, if that’s even the right word.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ Ray says. ‘Why split us up?’

  ‘He’s not splitting you up,’ Colt says, understanding now. ‘He’s splitting us up. Making sure there’s at least one untainted adult in each party. Right, Dad? You think I’m weak and can’t be trusted.’

  ‘We can’t trust ourselves,’ Warren says.

  ‘I’m not leaving my daughter!’

  ‘You think it’s… in you?’ Ray says, thinking of bacteria, bird flu.

  ‘I don’t know,’ his dad says. ‘But we’re losing people here. We have to assume the worst. Colette, honey, please consider the situation. Balancing our two parties might be the safest thing for your daughter.’

  ‘And now Mom,’ Colt says. ‘Suddenly she can walk? I mean, how’s that work?’