Sarah Allen - Lost Lake

“It’s getting late,” Wes said, suddenly standing. “We should get back.”

Kate stood and called to Devin. When Devin ran over to them, Kate asked, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“No. This would be so much easier if I was told what I’m supposed to find instead of just being given stupid clues.”

They followed Wes, who had already started off back down the road, running away from whatever ghosts he had here.

“You just said a mouthful, kiddo.”

After dinner, no one was in any particular hurry to leave. The evening held them down the quiet way a mother puts her hand on her infant’s chest to lull it to sleep. At least half an hour passed in silence, and they all remained seated, staring off into the distance.

But then Devin got up when she saw a frog. And Jack got up to show her how to feed it dead moths. Eby and Bulahdeen started cleaning and clearing. Kate had told Wes about “accidentally” throwing her phone in the lake, and he asked her to walk down to the dock to show him. Maybe he could retrieve it. Only Selma remained motionless, nursing the last of her drink, ignoring everyone, as she was wont to do. But Kate could feel her eyes on them, curious, as they disappeared into the darkness.

When they reached the dock, the blackness of the water made it look like silk, billowing as if pulled from a bolt.

“It’s out there in the middle of the lake, near the ghost ladies,” Kate said, pointing in the general direction she remembered throwing it. “I don’t think it’s retrievable.”

“I don’t know. We dove for a lot of treasure back then. The lake isn’t that deep.”

“It’s not worth it. Besides, according to Devin, there are alligators to think about.” Kate paused. “You know, when Devin mentioned earlier that her imaginary alligator talked about you, it startled me a little. I know she misses her dad, but she dealt with the transition so well, better than any of us. She always seemed to have him with her emotionally. I just … Why would her alligator talk about you and not him?”

Wes shook his head gently. “She’s not going to forget him, if that’s what you’re worried about. If Devin’s obsession with alligators is anything like my brother’s, then it’s harmless. It was just his way of dealing with things.”

“What sort of things?” she asked as they walked back to the lawn.

“Our father, mostly. Alligators are powerful, and Billy was powerless. I think it helped him to imagine a way of being in control, when our childhood was full of such chaos.”

They got to the lawn in time to see Selma floating down the path toward her cabin. The light from the lawn touched her red dress, making it glow with strange images, like a slide show as she moved.

They stopped and watched for a moment. “So, are you ever going to tell me what was in that letter you sent me?” Kate asked, thinking for just a moment how her life might have changed if they’d kept in touch, how his might have.

“It was a long time ago,” he said. Kate waited until he finally shook his head and smiled. “Great plots and schemes from the mind of a twelve-year-old boy. I wanted to move to Atlanta.”

“Really? What happened?”

“The fire happened.”

There was no going back after that. There was nothing to do but let those words sweep them through the years and land them solidly back in the present, older, wiser, different.

Kate finally said, “Don’t you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever?”

He shook his head. “You can’t live on a single memory,” he said as he walked away, toward his van.

“Wes,” Kate called. “You haven’t said anything about my offer to help Eby. What do you think?”

“I think it’s very generous,” he said. He got to his van and stopped. “But you can’t save everything, Kate. Sometimes it’s best to just move on.”

Bulahdeen sat on the couch in the sitting room while Kate dusted the bookshelves. It was an afterthought, a last-minute decision that the main house should look presentable in case anyone at the party decided to come inside. Lisette kept the dining room spotless, but the sitting room had an air of neglect, as if Eby had walked out of it one day, to get a cup of Earl Grey or to answer the phone, and had never returned. There was even a book laying open on one of the chairs, a fine film of dust on its pages and a tiny spiderweb along its spine.

Every once in a while, Kate would peer out the window to see if Devin was still on the dock. Today, the last day before the party, Wes was outside scraping the driveway with a grading attachment he’d secured to the front of his van, so that people arriving tomorrow wouldn’t spin out or get stuck in the uneven road when they parked. The dust he kicked up had sent Selma running to her cabin earlier, her handkerchief dramatically over her mouth as if she were fleeing a forest fire. Jack was in the kitchen with Lisette, helping her put the finishing touches on the cake. Eby had disappeared into one of the cabins, as she had for the past few days, while the party preparations were going on, emerging around dinnertime, dust in her hair, as if she’d crawled through a secret passageway, a portal from past to present.

There was an undeniable sense of anticipation in the air. No one knew exactly how many people were coming, but there was a possibility of it being something big. Kate found herself hoping that it would be, that it would be something grand, that it would be all that Bulahdeen wanted it to be. Kate had been waiting for the perfect time to approach Eby about helping her financially, and the more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that tomorrow would be it.

“I remember reading this book here, on the dock, fifteen years ago,” Kate said, picking up the book Eby had left on the chair.

Bulahdeen took a bite of the ham-and-Brie sandwich Lisette had brought her earlier. Lisette seemed to instinctively know when there was someone hungry nearby. She had appeared holding a plate with tiny violets painted on it as soon as Kate and Bulahdeen had entered. “I learned to read by that book,” Bulahdeen said, chewing her sandwich in tiny bites, like a squirrel.

“You learned to read by Jane Eyre?” Kate asked. “You must have been a very advanced reader.”

Bulahdeen shook her head. “Actually, I got a late start. We were so poor I didn’t even know I was supposed to go to school until I was seven. Then I couldn’t get enough of books. That’s why I taught literature. It always made me feel sneaky and giddy. Like I was getting away with something. I always thought that, at any moment, someone was going to tell me to put down my books and get a real job.”

“Have you read all of these?” Kate asked, indicating the wall of bookshelves.

“Every one.”

Kate laughed. “Eby should update her library, then.”

“No, I’ve read enough.” Bulahdeen finished her sandwich and licked her fingertips. “I never thought I’d say that, but it’s true.”

Kate put Jane Eyre on the shelf and continued to dust. “Why do you keep coming back here, Bulahdeen, when everyone else stopped?”

“Because life is my books these days. And every summer here is a new chapter. Ever read a story that you simply can’t imagine how it will end? This place is like that. The best things in life are like that. My husband has Alzheimer’s. You’d think that would be the end of that story, wouldn’t you? A brilliant man who loses his mind. The End. But, every once in a while, when I’m visiting him at the nursing home, he’ll turn to me and suddenly start talking about Flaubert. Then he’ll ask me how our sons are doing. As long as he’s still there, as long as this place is still here, the story goes on.”

Kate smiled as she looked out the window again. Devin was still on the dock, the cypress knee in one hand, her other hand up, shielding her eyes from the light as she looked across the lake. She was wearing her green bathing suit, white shorts, and a blue polka-dot capelet. She looked like a pint-size superhero on watch.

Kate turned back to Bulahdeen, only to find she’d stretched out on the couch and had fallen asleep with the plate on her stomach. Kate continued to clean, wiping off table surfaces and combing the dust out of pillow tassels.

The rumbling outside stopped, and the sudden silence left a buzz in her ears.

“Selma will be so disappointed now,” Bulahdeen said, her eyes still closed. “There’s one less thing for her to complain about.”

Kate started to respond, but she suddenly felt dizzy.

She grabbed the back of a chair. She thought she heard a splash, and there was a sensation of darkness behind her eyes. She looked to Bulahdeen, but the old lady hadn’t moved. What was happening? She tasted lake water in the back of her throat and felt a clamminess along her skin. She wiped her face, and her hand came away wet, with tiny grains of silt. She’d never experienced anything like it before.

She went to the window and looked out again. Devin was gone.

She ran out of the house to the lawn and looked around, panicked without any reasonable explanation why.

Wes had just gotten out of his van. The dust he’d stirred up from the driveway was settling around them like flour.

“Devin,” Kate said to him. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know. Why? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I think…” That’s when it occurred to her. “The cypress knees!”

In the few seconds it took Kate to turn, Wes had shot off like a stone from a slingshot, down to the lake and around the trail. It didn’t take long for her to catch up with him. He didn’t hesitate when he reached the group of cypress knees and jumped into the water and vanished.