Beneath the Lake Read online

  Colt sees it too. Sees Mother. Who is not a memory or a hallucination. Ray knows this because his sister is screaming.

  And then he is shouting at her, and his voice sounds very meek. ‘Mom! Mom! Stop! Mommy, don’t!’ Thinking she is about to jump, though she doesn’t.

  There is no need.

  Without sound or warning, the entire cliff face, a section at least six feet thick and twenty feet wide and forty feet high, cleaves from the earth behind it. Francine goes down as if in a chute, arms wheeling, legs kicking, the billowing white dress shirt flapping like wings.

  The ground does not rumble, there are no clouds of dust. There is no more aftershock than a sleeping boy feels when a stack of folded laundry lands at the foot of his bed, the way his mother sometimes coyly roused him on those lazy summer mornings. The smell of fresh blue jeans, her delicate humming of contentment pausing to deliver a ghostly kiss on his cheek, and in a shaft of morning light she’d be gone.

  Bathing

  The fallen shelf spares them by no more than twelve teasing steps of beach, and they attack the mound, legs spread, bent over and shoveling with both hands, frantic as dogs trained in war.

  Here. No, there. Deeper, but what if she’s right behind them, only a few inches below the top layer? They jump, dig, change positions, and dig some more.

  Minutes speed by, far too many, and they haven’t covered even a tenth of the mass. What’s worse, they could be walking on her, packing the sand over her even as they fall to their knees and slug their way past her. The only hope is that she secured a pocket of air, shielding a few more minutes of oxygen in some miraculous angle of limbs or cupped palms as the darkness filled in. The work becomes mentally agonizing before the pain registers in his back and shoulders, and worsens as the cramps turn his hands into trembling claws.

  Colt sounds like a locomotive barreling down its tracks, determined to blow its engine and shred its gears. Her breathing has become a constant heaving, and if it doesn’t end soon he will have to carry his sister back to camp, or leave her while he runs for help. Sweat streams into his eyes, from his nose like blood, and they burrow from one spot to the next, abandoning one den for another.

  Until Colt’s fingers snag in the clogged hair.

  ‘Here!’ she screams, her voice unrecognizable.

  Ray scurries over the hillock and together, scraping around the shoulders and hips and one arm bent behind her back, they work in a final frenzy to free her from the warm avalanche. Colt excavates and Ray reaches under his mother’s armpits to drag her backward, up, and then down the berm to the flat beach.

  Francine is mummified in dark brown sand. Even free of its tomb, her body seems to have doubled its mass. Her mouth and eye sockets are packed with layers of it, still moist. Ray plunges his fingers into her mouth, slinging clods of it from within her cheeks, scooping it from her throat. Her esophagus bulges, her chest has hardened. Ray knows before he begins that her lungs must be sandbags by now. His mother’s lips are warm, gritty. He chips a tooth trying to force his air into her.

  At some point they roll her onto her stomach, as if a miracle might yet prevail and the change of position will allow her to regurgitate the earth. Colt lifts at the hips and Ray clears a path under her face, bracing her chin with his legs. She slips, her head rolling to one side in a loose swing. He feels along the base of her skull, to the lump below it. Her neck is broken, so much of her must be. Then she is only cooling in the night, this mysterious woman who was his mother, and he wishes for all the missed opportunities to return, or even one, the most meaningless of them, that he might prove his love for her.

  ‘Stop,’ he tells his sister, who is still massaging their mother’s back, trying to roll the sand out, bully the life back in. Colt begins to pound between the shoulders, and their laboring over the broken vessel seems obscene. ‘She’s gone, Colt. Stop. Stop!’

  Colt does, resting her hands flat, the body the only thing keeping her from collapsing onto it.

  ‘The weight,’ he says. ‘Tons of this shit. On her. Inside her. Nothing we could have done. Even if we’d found her in the first thirty seconds.’

  This is not consolation he is trying to offer. He felt this coming the moment he saw her standing up there on the precipice of time. Made young again, to remind him. As if she were telling him, Don’t forget me, Ray. Don’t forget how I was, before the darkness and the bitter years had their way with me. I was beautiful, wasn’t I? I was really something…

  She isn’t like that now. Young, pretty, strong. She is only dead, then not even the she he once knew. Mother. Mom. mom. mmmm. Flesh, bone, hair, water. Her conviction has departed, and now she isn’t anything he can hold.

  Colt glares at him in the dark, cheeks smeared with sand. It is all over them, up to their elbows, necks, in their ears and grinding between their molars. His sister looks half dead herself, panting her way into mute surrender. She looks past him, following some riddle over the beach, to the water. Colt rises, lurching her way down the broken column, to the lake that had once been a river and, flowing, carved their mother’s death from the valley before she and her children were born.

  Ray sits on the packed damp rim where the night’s thinnest waves ripple and spread like sheets of molten black glass. The water is soothing on his toes. He longs to plunge his entire being into its dark depths, washing himself and swimming in Blundstone for the first time in thirty years.

  Colt stands in it knee-deep, sixty or seventy paces out. She is naked, her lean legs and taut backside pale in the moonless night. Ray does not try to stop her. The vacant look in her eyes as she cast aside her sand-packed bra and choked out the last of her sobs – he understood she needed to swim. Needs the change of atmosphere, escaping the lethal element that has taken their mother by springing into its opposite.

  Colt moves in deeper, the lake seems to be lowering her on an escalator, until her oddly wide hips sink below the surface, where she becomes an arrow, diving out to greet whatever waits for her, and to wash it off.

  He feels it clinging to him all over, the sand. But he is not ready to swim. Not so soon after Leonard.

  He watches Colt, grinding his teeth as she sinks all the way in.

  He walks up the beach as she dresses, and when he returns something he cannot identify has been rinsed from her mind as well, leaving only a cold resolve.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she says. ‘We’ve been gone most of the night. We don’t know what could have happened to the others. They don’t know about Mom. So, what difference does it make, when we get back?’

  ‘You don’t want to tell them?’

  Colt shakes her head. ‘I mean we don’t go back now. What if we go for help first? Tonight. Before it’s too late.’

  Ray thinks of the promise he made to Megan. ‘What about Sierra?’

  ‘Mom was standing up there like she knew. Like something told her this spot was going to cave in. And then something in her agreed with that. Wanted it.’

  ‘That wasn’t Mom,’ Ray says. ‘Not the real Mom.’

  ‘Exactly. Which is why the real Colt needs to be strong and track down some real help for her real daughter. Being away from Sierra for another few hours is the tougher choice, which means it’s probably the right one in the long run.’

  ‘Well, we have to head that way anyway,’ he says. ‘If we haven’t collapsed by the time we reach the boat ramp, we’ll follow the road out to the highway. By then the sun will be up. We can flag someone down, maybe. If not, we’ll have walked another eight or ten miles for nothing. We’ll have to come all the way back or walk the next forty miles into town.’

  ‘I guess we better get started then.’

  ‘And if something happens while we’re gone…’

  ‘We’ll never forgive ourselves,’ Colt says. ‘But that’s a point I reached a long time ago.’

  Ray flicks his flashlight on but the bulb is very dim. The batteries are almost finished. ‘You can’t blame yourself for Mom. Or Leon
ard.’

  Colt bends to tie her shoe. ‘You misunderstand me. I blame myself for not leaving Simon before things got really bad. For bringing my daughter on this trip. For not trusting that little voice in my head that warned me it’s too late. That since we left here thirty years ago, it’s always been too late.’

  She rises, and together they march on.

  Gatekeeper

  ‘I need to ask you something about New York,’ Ray says, anywhere from ninety minutes to three hours later, as the sky begins to trade black for navy blue. They are above the boat ramp, on the dirt road and a good mile past the old well, where they paused for much needed hydration. Finding the road was milestone, but they were too tired to celebrate. Their conversation has dwindled to a few brief remarks now and then. Is that a turtle? No. How are your legs holding up? No answer. He says things, no longer expecting her to respond, but this time she does.

  ‘Ask away.’ Her slender body moves in a stiff, hitching rhythm.

  ‘When Dad was giving us that speech at brunch, going down his list of failures, he slipped in some comment about the, uh…’

  ‘The assault. You want to know about the assault.’

  ‘Yeah, that.’

  ‘What mess did poor little Colette wind up in this time?’ she says. ‘When will she ever learn?’

  ‘That wasn’t my assumption. Nobody ever told me, that’s all.’

  Colt laughs. ‘It was my husband. How about that?’

  ‘Simon?’

  ‘There was only one. He hit me. Several times over several months.’

  ‘Piece of shit,’ Ray says, with no real enthusiasm. ‘This was before or after Sierra came into the picture?’

  ‘About a year ago. I had come to despise him. Some part of me wanted him to hit me, I think. So that I would have a clear reason for leaving, and taking his daughter away. I know that sounds sick, and it was. I was not well. But he was worse.’

  ‘What was behind all this? What was the problem?’

  ‘Hard to remember. For the first few years, we had a great life. Money, jobs, social events. Simon was a rising star in the bank, managing risk for their international real estate portfolio. Mexico and South Korea were his specialties. I was on the boards of two charities, after I sold the TV channel. We had Sierra. Everything was… well, things are never perfect, but we were working hard to be a part of the exciting things. The restaurants. The theater. Underground art. Actors and filmmakers. All these amazing things… in the greatest city in the world. And the world went round and round, and then one night he raped me.’

  ‘Simon…’

  ‘Raped. Me. You’re the first person I’ve told. Everyone else, I said it was fighting, verbal abuse, slapping.’

  Ray is shaken. It takes him a minute to ask, ‘Why me?’

  ‘You’re my brother. And maybe it’s time.’

  ‘Not even Len?’

  ‘Only would have made him crazier,’ she says. ‘Anyway. We were going to a lot of dinners, functions, gallery openings. Neither of us drank a lot, or did drugs. I was just coming out of the pregnancy, birth and staying home, that whole two-year phase, and I threw myself into things as if I’d missed every party and important event in the city. I was still post-partum. Wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I was. Suddenly I started drinking a lot, it was like someone flipped a switch. I was nineteen again. We hadn’t had sex in a while. A long while. I hadn’t even noticed, but Simon did. He was always harping on me. Making these snide remarks. I know he resented Sierra, too. Like she was the reason. But she wasn’t. Or not the main one. It was me. I didn’t want him to touch me. I couldn’t stand the thought. Maybe it was hormones. Maybe I never really loved him. I don’t know. All I know is, it changed, we changed. It was gone. I couldn’t have him touching me anymore. He joked about hiring a nanny to take care of us. Help us all out. The way he said it, you knew he meant something vile.

  ‘The third or fourth time he made his little joke, I told him to go right ahead. Hire the youngest, prettiest, freshest little twat he could find. Said I would pay for it. Said I would rather he stuck his pathetic little banker dick inside someone who worked in our home than in me ever again. Sorry, I know you don’t want to hear this.’

  Ray doesn’t. But he understands that his sister needs to tell it. ‘No, it’s fine. We are in therapy now. This is a safe place.’

  Colt laughs. ‘All this time, I thought Leonard was most like Dad. So intense. But you’re the real hardass of the family.’

  ‘Right,’ Ray says.

  ‘I’m serious. You haven’t cried once on this trip. Despite everything that’s happened. Not over Len. Not after Mom. You’re made of steel, Raymond Mercer.’

  Ray realizes she is right. Not about the steel. But that he didn’t cry over Leonard, or Mom. What’s wrong with him? Something that can’t be pinned on being away from them for a decade, that’s for sure.

  ‘I must seem pretty cold to you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ Colt says. She seems more awake now. Walking straighter. ‘We need you like this. I need you.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Someone has to be strong, and it’s not me,’ she says. ‘Dad is trying, but you can see it slipping out of his grasp. He’s old, Ray. Tired. I’m not sure I believe him about his heart condition.’

  ‘You think he’s sick?’

  ‘I think he’s scared. He thinks he can save us, but he’s convinced he wasn’t meant to leave here. Once he finds out what happened to Mom…’

  The road is beginning to bend. Ray knows they must be nearing the highway. Another mile, two at most. The eastern horizon is pinkening in beautiful relief. Ray was beginning to doubt he would ever see another sunrise.

  Colt doesn’t seem to notice the coming dawn. ‘He didn’t blow up at me or anything, when I said he should go find someone else. He just got real quiet, and stayed like that for a few weeks. I don’t know if I thought he had taken my offer to heart or what. I think I was hoping it would all go away.

  ‘About a month later, we went to a party these friends of ours held in this ridiculous five-story brownstone on the Upper West Side. It was supposed to be a classy affair, some benefit fundraiser for a youth program these three couples were launching. Two hundred people showed up. The place turned into a scene. Everyone was doing coke, breaking these pinatas, screwing in the bathroom. I got very drunk. Embarrassed Simon in front of several of his clients, though I knew he wanted to be doing what the rest of them were doing. Turning into animals. Fucking some girl in the coat closet. I remember eating sushi with a fork, chasing it down with endless champagne. I’m sure I was off my ass. I don’t remember leaving, or being asked to leave, but that’s what Simon said on the way home, in the cab where I was busy throwing up.

  ‘Simon had to drag me past the doorman, haul me out of the elevator. Our place was two stories and I had to crawl up the stairs to check on Sierra. She was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake her, so I tiptoed to the bathroom. I shut the door and locked it. I am very clear about that. Locking myself in there. You see? I was afraid of him. I wasn’t thinking about it, I’d never even considered it. But some part of me must have sensed he was capable of it. I locked the door and slumped down on the cold tile floor in my cocktail dress and fell asleep. Well, passed out. I wasn’t as drunk by then but I wanted him to think I was.’