Beneath the Lake Read online

  Her arms bring him back, small but strong around his neck.

  The sun-darkened nub of her little nose. She pulls herself forward with a small splash and presses her lips to his, making a loud smooch when she lets go.

  He feels embarrassed and strange but other ways too. Something more than happiness washes through him, making him warm, and he can’t put a name to it yet but in his mind it is shaped like a little blue crystal filled with sunlight.

  She laughs at what she’s done.

  On the beach around the point where the even the softest wind can’t reach them, they huddle under a blanket she found in one of the abandoned tents. He is not cold, but it’s better being under with her.

  She leans against his shoulder while they watch the trees stir across the cove and talk about their favorite things, foods and candy for a start. Zero bar, he says, and describes it for her. He asks if she is hungry, realizing he’s not either only once she answers no.

  Where did everybody go? he wonders with her.

  They have seen no one and no one has seen them.

  I think they all got lost in the storm, she says.

  How long have you been here? he asks. All alone?

  I don’t know, she answers, after a long silence. I haven’t learned how to tell the time.

  *

  They open the blanket and lie back, holding hands under the sun. He is tempted to nap, but he’s not tired yet and doesn’t want to miss anything before her family comes back and she has to leave.

  A distant sound makes her sit up suddenly, one hand over her eyes. Far up the beach is a dark surging spot, coming toward them, faster and faster, kicking up sand and soon they hear the crazy barking.

  She pats his leg three times in excitement. She opens her arms, leaping to her feet. Rusty, she screams. Rusty, here, here here here!

  The dog comes to her, a freight train of wet cinnamon fur and slobber and muscles like smooth pounding machines. His tail wagging so fast it blurs. Bunching up his shoulders and lowering his round head in the last furious strides, the dog launches himself and soars, crashing over the blanket with a delirious roll. He flops and leaps and twists like bucking bronco, slapping them with his sand-crusted tail. He tackles her and licks and licks and licks her face and she laughs and laughs and laughs.

  Daddy was right, she tells him later, after the bulldog has settled in the sand beside her. The dog sniffs at him, and then at the lake every so often, but mostly he keeps his head pressed to her, reminding her to keep scratching his ears.

  Time heals all wounds, Daddy said, and it’s true. Rusty can run.

  I told you he wouldn’t forget, he says.

  They walk the woods, following the broken trail as best they can. The dog races ahead, through the ripped-out trees, through bushes and over the fields to sniff the messes and pale-skinned things out in the grass. Rusty whines over them, pushing his nose at them to wake them up, but they never do and he always comes back to walk at her side.

  All the plants and trees are covered with sand, even the ones left standing, which are covered up to the top. The leaves are caked brown, heavy and drying in the sun. Back up through the fields they walk, through blades of grass coated with sand, passing spilled coolers and torn sleeping bags and upside down lawn chairs and trash, all the things scattered by the storm.

  Her family’s big green tent is gone, she says it turned into a giant kite. The white truck is not far from where her daddy parked, but it is flipped over on one side. Down the dirt road, past the iron water pump with the orange handle, the ranger truck is flat on its roof like a clumsy turtle. It is pale green with a brown badge on the door and all the glass from the windows is spread across the field like jewels.

  Up the road a ways, as far as they care to walk, the ranger station still stands.

  They don’t like the swollen shape inside, the shadow it makes on the window, so they leave it alone.

  What is it? she asks. What’s inside there?

  I think he was sad, he tells her. Because he didn’t get here in time to warn them.

  It wasn’t his fault, she says. Poor ranger.

  Going to be dark soon, he tells her. We should find a good place to stay the night.

  She agrees, and they walk back to the point.

  But most of that is gone, and what’s left is a deep hole in the earth.

  Their camper is shaped like the beer cans his dad sometimes crushed between his hands. The Bronco is sideways in the trees across the field. All the glass is gone and the seats and all the insides are coated with wet sand.

  He points out their things all spread around, showing her the stick his brother used to catch snakes and his sister’s favorite rainbow hair band. He finds his dad’s blue Timex watch under a package of hot dog buns and tries to see what time it is, but the glass face is foggy and the hands are not moving only stuck at 7:26. He tries to remember where he was when the hands stopped but he can’t.

  He shows her one of his Incredible Hulk sandals stuck in a crop of wet grass. It is green with a red stripe down the middle, and the green is how he remembers it but the red is something else.

  Rusty barks and runs the other way, so they follow him down the boat ramp to the beach and over to the blanket. He starts to sit, but she tells him not here.

  The dog watches them from the end of the sand bar, past where all the fireworks went off. He barks but they don’t listen. He barks at the lake and steps into it, but they won’t listen. They carry the blanket around the point, to the other beach facing the sun.

  The sun is setting and she wants to watch it go down.

  It was always her favorite part of the day, the most beautiful thing in it.

  *

  They find a spot in soft sand and wrap the blanket over their bare backs. Sometimes she shivers and he pulls her closer, close as they can go. Soon they figure it would be easier to watch the sun if she was sitting in front, between his legs, and he lets her make a chair of his chest, his legs for the arms, and the blanket around them keeps the wind off better but he can still smell her hair in it, soft as it blows.

  Her dog comes back, sniffing around them but no longer wagging his tail. He crouches beside them, licks her once, and rests his chin in the sand between his paws.

  One time I dreamed I was really old, she says, relaxing into him.

  What was it like?

  I don’t know. I think it was just lots of days. All of the other days.

  What were they like?

  I can’t remember, she says, and he feels her laugh softly.

  I can’t remember mine either, he says. Only what was before this, the other vacations and a few things from home.

  What were they like?

  He thinks about it for a while. The far end of the lake pulls the sun down, bringing it closer and closer.

  I don’t know, he decides. You should have asked me before. Then I could tell you lots of things. I’m sorry. I wish I could.

  That’s okay, she says. Remember today? Swimming together?

  Always.

  The great orange is only half, the bottom under, the top floating.

  She looks up, trying to find his eyes. Are you scared?

  Earlier. Not now. Are you?

  She turns her head, rubbing her ears between his arms.

  He can’t remember the dog’s name when the dog stands up, licking her arm and giving a final soft whimper. The dog walks a few steps, looking back at her, then away to the reddening curve at the end of the lake. The dog barks at it, tail wagging, and he sprints off, hurling himself up the beach, hind legs throwing sand in a high rhythmic spray. He becomes a cinnamon spot running, running, until they see him no more.

  She sits still inside his arms as the sky drains of color and the sand turns gray, first like the clouds from yesterday, then darker, burned to ash.

  The blanket no longer holds them and he knows it was never here. The things they used to touch can’t come with them.

  Her name becomes li
ke the dog’s name and so is his own. He used to know it like he knew all the rest, the pale ones left in the field, but there is no more room for the names and the things and the days, only for her.

  The roof of the sun becomes a single thinning arch of blood orange, and then a last golden thread before sinking all the way. The lake has it now. Full night has come.

  The wind is gone but still they shiver, pressing closer, but it’s never close enough and her skin is too cold.

  He waits, and she waits with him.

  In the dark of the beach turned black around her feet, something moves. Brightly pale and timid, a baby toad crosses the dark ridges, kicking his way over the soft dunes. He hesitates in young but knowing caution, then scoots along, finding his way to the water by instinct alone.

  She goes forth, pulling him up, leading him the way the toad knew. She always waited for him and now, in the last steps, he waits for her. She can’t move her feet or anything else and he stops to lift her up, cradling her into his arms and down into the water as he did just before they kissed, weightless under the tallest part of the day.

  The lake is a black mirror stretching beyond Nebraska, bottomless and longer than he ever dreamed. If you try hard enough, you can read the curvature of the earth across its surface, and somewhere beneath it the swallowed sun.

  The two of them learn to swim the great bend of it as one, all.

  Unbound.