The Lost Girls (10 page)

She put the box back on the floor. Then she lay down, pulled Lucy's quilt to her chin, and closed her eyes. She left the light on.

There is nothing so quiet as this place after the summer guests have gone. It's my favorite time of year. The leaves are beginning to turn, and the air is crisp, but it's not cold yet. The geese fly south in great dark vees that span the sky, and the lake is calm.

Matthew's teenaged summer hires are working their last days, cleaning the cabins and closing down the kitchen. Right now he's pulling the boats out so he can tow them to Olema for the winter. He'll leave one for himself until the lake freezes. It's the only season he has time to fish, and he'll go out every morning. If he catches more than he needs, he'll bring a couple of small ones by for me, cleaned and ready to fry.

Yesterday he brought in the old pontoon. A wooden platform mounted on oil drums, it's been a summer fixture since 1935. The children love to jump off it, though when they swim out there, their dark heads bobbing, I want their mothers to call them back. I mind my own business, of course. Besides, it's not anchored as far from shore as it was that summer, when Lilith and I swam to it.

It was shortly before Independence Day, and summer had arrived in earnest. It was hot by midmorning, with a haze that leached the color from the water and the sky. Lilith and I were sweaty, bored, and trying to think of something to do as we wandered down to the dock. Most people were inside their houses, trying to stay cool, but the two littlest Jones brothers were building a sand fort on the beach, and Abe and Matthew were working in the boat shed. As we passed, Abe raised his hand to wave, but at a glance from Matthew he put it down again. Lilith didn't look
at him, but she ran her hand through her hair in a way that told me she'd noticed.

We tucked our skirts underneath us and sat on the end of the metal dock, wincing a little at the filtered heat on the backs of our thighs. Lilith took off her sandals and dipped her toes in the water. I wished the dock were lower, so my feet could touch it, too. It didn't occur to me that my legs would grow.

Lilith looked back at Abe, and I said, irritated, “Why are you looking at him?”

“He's handsome, don't you think?”

“He's a retard.” I tossed the word off as if I said it as often as I'd heard it on the schoolyard. I knew it wasn't fair, though. Abe wasn't retarded. He was just a little simple, and he had a childlike way about him that his body had outstripped years before. He has it even now.

Lilith shrugged. “I think he's sweet.”

We sat without speaking for a while. Then I said, “Maybe we could go to the Hundred Tree.” We still hadn't been there, and this had been troubling me.

We'd found the Hundred Tree four years before. The forest around the lake is dense, and most of the lake children never went farther into it than their mother's voices could reach. But our mother's voice never called, so Lilith and I went wherever we wanted, which meant we went wherever Lilith led us. One day we came upon a clearing deep in the woods that was dominated by a magnificent oak, its trunk ten feet across at the bottom. Its base was split and it was hollow inside, but despite this it was strong and alive.

“This will be our secret place,” Lilith said. Light filtered through the tree's branches in a patchwork on the mulchy earth, and on Lilith, making her elfin and strange, her dark hair struck with silver and her pale eyes flat like new nickels. “No one can find us here.”

We called it the Hundred Tree because we thought it must be the unimaginable age of one hundred years old. We cleared the inside and smuggled pillows from the house and set them in a circle around a large flat rock we dragged and pushed through fifty yards of forest. We brought egg cartons to hold the beads, marbles, and Cracker Jack trinkets we hoarded like magpies. We sat for hours in the cool dark, feeling the living tree around us as an embrace. We talked. We were silent. We escaped there as often as we needed to during that summer and the summers that came after.

But now, when I brought it up, Lilith smoothed her skirt as if brushing away dust. I tried to stifle my fear that the Hundred Tree had gone the way of the tree house and the playground in town. Then her eyes lit upon the pontoon. “I know what we should do. We should swim out there.”

I peered at it. As I said, it was new that year, and it wasn't for children then. It was for people who didn't like to fish from a boat or who wanted to picnic while they fished, so it was half a mile into the lake, almost to the westernmost of the two points. Through the wavy summer air it looked even farther away than that.

We weren't allowed to go there, of course. The lake bottom dropped off past the dock and we weren't permitted to swim beyond it. But Lilith's eyes snatched at mine, sparking with that devilish light I could never resist. I thought about the Hundred Tree, and how she'd led me there. I thought about the Miller boys, too, and how far away from them the pontoon was. I said, “Okay.”

She clapped her hands and ran for the house, and in her excitement she looked like the young girl she still was. We changed into our swimming suits and grabbed towels from the linen press. When we came back out, Abe was standing at the edge of our front yard, talking to Emily. When Emily saw us she ran over, her feet skip-skipping in the dirt. “Can I come swimming with you? Please? I'll ask Mother.”

Although Mother didn't keep as close an eye on Emily during
the week as she did on the more straitlaced weekends, she never let her leave our yard without permission. She would probably say no, but we couldn't risk it. If she did let Emily come, she'd come out to the beach herself to watch over her, and we would be stuck dog-paddling in the shallows. I started to run past without answering her, but Lilith stopped, standing over her with her hands on her hips. “We aren't going swimming. We're going to do something secret, and you're not invited.” She put her hands on Emily's shoulders. Emily was so small that Lilith's thumbs met in the hollow of her neck. “If you tell Mother, I will pull out all of your eyelashes.”

Emily's hands flew to her eyes. Of course she believed her. Lilith had carried out many a threat and perpetrated many a small meanness on our little sister; even I believed she would do it. I stood beside Lilith, relishing, as always, my exclusive position as her chosen comrade. To Emily I said, “You couldn't do it anyway. You're a baby.”

Lilith laughed and grabbed my arm. We ran to the beach, our bare feet still soft enough that the pebbles on the road pricked at the soles. The Jones brothers were deep into their sand excavations and didn't notice us, but Lilith veered aside anyway, to the far edge of the beach. I stole a glance back at Emily. She was sitting on the porch steps, her hands still pressed to her eyes. Her shoulders were hunched close to her bent knees, and she looked so miserable that for a moment I felt a little bit sorry for her. Abe walked over in his slow way and sat beside her, putting an arm around her. Maybe, I thought, he wouldn't be so impressed with Lilith if he knew what she'd said to Emily.

I forgot about Emily, though, as Lilith wrapped our towels around our heads so we looked like Arabs, and posed and walked about as she imagined an Arab might, making me laugh. Then we were paddling through the water, our towels dry in their makeshift turbans. Within fifty feet the bottom disappeared, and we turned toward the pontoon.

Oh, it was exhilarating! The water splashed around my face, smelling musky and fecund in a way it didn't in the tamer places close to shore. My arms were brindled with sunlight as they carved neat arcs just beneath the surface. I felt like a water sprite, graceful in my natural element, and as I swam I thanked the sister whose adventurous spirit led me to do things I would never otherwise dare.

But Lilith was a stronger swimmer than I, and although I strained to keep up, she left me behind. Soon I tired, and as my legs grew heavy beneath me I craned my neck and was shocked to see how far away she'd gotten, and how much farther still was the pontoon. I looked back: the shore was a thin brown line, the Jones brothers like ants scurrying among their tiny battlements. A finger of fear tickled the edge of my mind, and just like that I was no longer a water sprite; I was an eleven-year-old girl in the middle of a lake, a towel on her head, treading green water that had no bottom. My heartbeat slammed in my ears. The water, so buoyant when I'd set out, clutched at me with fingers stronger than gravity. I called Lilith, but my voice was high and weak, and she didn't hear. She was too far away to save me anyway.

I forced my lungs to slow down, to draw great, shuddering breaths. All I had to do was keep swimming. I fixed my eyes on the pontoon in the distance, and ordered my limbs to propel me toward it. For an unmeasurable time I concentrated on moving forward, trying not to think about how deep the water was or how far I had to go. I swam until my legs felt like they were made of concrete, my arms felt filled with lead, my side burned with a cramping stitch, and my neck ached from holding my head with its towel-turban above the water. Finally, nearing the end of my strength, I looked up—and there! The pontoon was a mere hundred feet away, and Lilith sat on it, relaxed and mocking in the sunshine. She waved, telling me to hurry up, lazy-bones.

One hundred feet. I could do it. Water ran into my eyes and I
blinked it away. My mouth was barely above the surface now. Then the towel, already half undone, fell in soggy clumps around my shoulders, and its sodden weight dragged me under. I fought my way up to take a breath, but I sank again, and this time I couldn't get back—the surface was a bright, shimmering veil that floated away from my reaching hands. I held my breath for as long as I could, but at last it burst from my lips in loud, glossy bubbles. My empty lungs burned, then they spasmed open and the lake flooded in, thick and cool and sweet, and filled me all the way up.

A deep, soft silence fell. Without the thrashing of my limbs or the frothing of air from my lungs, my ears filled with the quiet pulse of the water. The water was golden, stabbed by the sun, and tiny motes of algae floated in the slanting rays of light. Below me the gold filtered into green, the green dimmed to black, and the black dropped away to the deep, cold heart of the lake. The towel slipped from my shoulders, and I watched its sinuous descent, a pale thing spiraling into the darkness. My fear was gone. In its place a great calm descended, languid and cool, whispering of homecoming and safety and infinite secrecy. My arms drifted, dappled still by surface light as I sank through the deepening water.

Then something grabbed my hand and yanked me upward, and my head burst back into the bright, screaming world. The screaming came from Lilith, who was shouting at me to swim as she dragged me toward the pontoon by the strap of my bathing suit. I couldn't swim, so I lay on my back, coughing up water and gulping air that tore my lungs like shards of glass while she pulled me along beneath the violently blue sky.

After I hauled myself onto the pontoon she shrieked at me: What was I doing? I knelt on my hands and knees, retching up the last of the lake water. When I was done I fell forward onto my face, feeling the warmth of the wooden planks on my cheek. I looked up at Lilith with one eye. Her shoulders were heaving and her hair was matted to her head. Her hands were shaking by her sides.

“The towel got wet and dragged me under,” I said, my voice hoarse.

“Why didn't you just drop it?”

I had no answer. She had tied it on my head. It hadn't occurred to me to let it go.

She combed her fingers through her hair, calming herself. Then she wrung it out, twisting it into a knot. “Well. If I'd known you were such a lousy swimmer, I never would've brought you out here.”

I felt the sudden prick of tears. Lilith flopped onto her back on her towel and closed her eyes. Her face was still flushed and her breathing was still fast. The sun glittered in the water droplets that lay upon her cheeks and brow like diamonds.

We stayed like that for a long time. My heartbeat slowed and the sun dried my skin and the cotton of my swimming suit. Eventually I could tell that Lilith had fallen asleep. I lay still, feeling the pontoon sway gently beneath me. The oil barrels pinged in the heat. My arms and legs felt like they were filled with sand.

The sun was high overhead when Lilith stirred, then sat up. “It's almost time for lunch. Let's go.” She wrapped her towel around her head and sat on the edge of the pontoon, ready to jump in. I dug my fingers into the wood as the platform rocked with her movements. “What's wrong?” she asked.

I tucked my knees under my chin. I couldn't get back in the water.

She made an exasperated sound. “How do you think you're going to get back, then? Is someone going to have to bring a boat for you?”

I studied my knees some more. Yes.

“Mother will be furious if she finds out we were here.”

I couldn't imagine Mother feeling anything as strong as fury about anything we might do. It didn't matter; I still couldn't do it. I was paralyzed with fear.

Lilith stood up. She was quite capable of fury, and hers was an electric thing, charging the very air about her. I could feel the hair on my arms stand on end as she glared at me. Then I felt her soften. She sat down and put her arm around me. With her other hand she tucked a stray curl behind my ear. “Don't be afraid, Lulu.” Her old nickname for me, unused for too long. Her eyes were as clear as the sky. “I'll swim beside you the whole way. I promise.” She touched her index finger to her lips, then to her heart, then held her hand up, waiting.

Shakily, my hand repeated her movements, my palm pressing hers in the private seal that had marked our allegiance for as long as I could remember. Her hand was warm and firm. My lungs expanded and filled with the soft summer air, and together we slipped into the lake.

That night I lay in bed and watched the lace curtain float in a breeze that smelled wet and green. My breath moved in and out of my body with easy sweetness. My limbs felt as heavy on the sheets as they'd felt when I'd drifted down through the water.