All the doors.
“Here we go,” Amelia said, talking to James just like he talked to her. No actual communication between them.
She got up and used the banister to balance herself.
The flashlight was acting up on me.
It didn’t sound so shameful now, so unadventurous to go and get a better light. The square at the top of the stairs, the gateway to the second story, reminded Amelia of the sort of hole you chance upon in a forest floor, then step widely around.
Amelia took the first stair up. Then the next.
Quick now, she was halfway there and thinking how James hadn’t been this far, how maybe nobody had been this far in the whole wide world.
She moon-stepped the next stair. Then the next.
Ahead, the light didn’t reveal much more than the beginning of a hallway.
“Well, James, here we are. Dating. Is this our second date? No. This would probably be our third. Two dates underwater. One up above. Good for us. We’re insane.”
She took the next step.
“Some people go to the movies, some people make out in their cars, parked behind schools.”
Another step.
“Some people meet for coffee. Some for drinks. Men and women meet for drinks. Happens all the time.”
Another.
“But us? We’re taking turns in a crazy place.”
She liked that. Taking turns in a crazy place. Sounded like…like love.
Two steps from the top and she stopped.
Far ahead the light showed her a door.
“It’d be a bad time for the flashlight to break,” she said.
A single door. At the end of a long wood-paneled hallway. Floating between her and the door were a few fish. All of them dead.
“They swim on their sides,” she pretended to tell James. “That’s all. Side swimmers.”
Darkness and cold water split by the beam.
She understood that she wished she had less slack. She understood, clearly, that she’d like a reason to turn back.
“No,” she said, shaking her head inside the helmet. “Let’s explore.”
The fear ebbed, leaving only the adrenaline of exploration to play with.
Amelia began walking, plodding, astronaut-esque, toward the door at the end of the hall in the house at the bottom of a lake.
17
No doors along the hall and it started to feel as though Amelia was being shuffled toward the only door, the one at the far end. Felt like a gentle but wide wave was nudging her, from behind, guiding her there.
She bounded, slowly, past mirrors, looking just long enough to see the various expressions on her face behind the bubble helmet. The flashlight reflected harsh off the glass, the water distorted things, and Amelia hardly recognized herself at all.
The door was arched at the top, the kind of door Amelia always wanted for her bedroom as a child. It looked partially functional and partially pure fiction. The sort of door that asked a person to open it.
Amelia put a gloved hand on the doorknob, and the door moved with no more movement than that.
“James,” she said. “You want to take it from here?”
She didn’t want to think these words. She wanted to say them. Because nobody would speak out loud if they were scared. If Amelia was scared she wouldn’t want to make a sound, wouldn’t want to attract a mother fish or a who-knows-what buried on the second story of a house at the bottom of a lake. If Amelia was scared she wouldn’t walk with such confidence. She’d worry about the breathing tube, about the pressure inside the helmet. She’d be sweating, trembling, too clumsy to guide the hose alongside her. She’d be crying, retreating, curling up into a ball, sitting down wherever she was, floating, letting the water take her. If Amelia was scared she wouldn’t have climbed the steps, wouldn’t be standing at an impossible (and open) door that should have disintegrated a long time ago.
She swallowed once, hard, and thought she could hear its echo, the whole lake swallowing with her.
A movement, subtle, but everywhere.
A breath.
Amelia crossed the threshold and entered the room upstairs.
“Oh!”
A yellow dress floated across the room toward her. Floating horizontal, it looked as though someone were wearing it.
Seven feet above the floor.
Amelia ducked. It was a silly thing to do, as the yellow dress rode an unseen current.
When you opened the door, you caused a wave—
“Say the words out loud!” she demanded of herself. “You’re not scared!”
The dress folded in on itself and rose to the ceiling in a corner of the room.
Amelia stepped farther into the room and kept the beam on the dress, studying its yellow fabric, the tiny frills at the shoulder ends. She could imagine the creamy, pale skin those frills once lay upon, could imagine the form of a pretty woman filling the dress, before the woman took it off and released it…letting it float from her fingertips, deeper into the dark room.
Amelia felt the presence of something to her right and turned fast.
She brought a hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp but her fingers clunked against the glass and she stared at a second dress, a red one, floating, too, but as if standing up, as if on a hanger, suspended, perfectly upright.
Amelia stepped back and found herself against the door.
It was closed now.
How?
“No hows!”
But her voice was small, so small in the glass helmet.
In the beam, it looked like the red dress could take a step toward her if it wanted to, could approach her, quicker than she herself could move.
Then the water took it, folding it at the waist.
Behind it, an open wardrobe was revealed.
Empty wooden hangers within.
Slowly, Amelia went to it. She fingered the hangers, her gloved hands too clumsy to do anything but fumble.
She trained the light up and saw a gray dress flat to the ceiling. If a woman were inside it, that woman would be facing her.
To her left a mauve dress floated toward her, level enough to look occupied, as if someone were limping in it, drunk perhaps, the water filling the fabric in such a way as to make it look curvy, embodied, in use, worn by somebody who was not quite right, somebody who was…
“Deformed,” Amelia said. Because she didn’t want to just think it.
When the dress reached her, Amelia held out her gloved hands and the fabric folded limply over them. Gently, she let it fall away and saw behind it a fourth dress.
This one was black, positioned near the floor, as if sitting up, watching Amelia directly.
Amelia shone the light everywhere. She counted three more dresses. Floating in the corners, where the floors met the walls and the walls met each other, too.
At either side of the room she saw sets of twin doors, doors that should, if Amelia had her bearings, lead eventually back toward the staircase. She understood that there must be bedrooms through these doors, other rooms, rooms with windows, at least one of which she and James had seen from the canoe.
She stepped toward the doors to her right, to the side of the house James floated above.
She reached for the doors, saw they were open, and pressed a bulky gold palm against them.
A blue dress emerged from the opened space and floated over her helmet, into the darkness behind her.
She tracked it with the flashlight, back across the room, where it sank, momentarily, to the floor, at the hem of the black dress.
“Not scared,” she said.
Breathing deeply, she passed through the twin open doors.
18
“Wow,” Amelia said, the helmet only half off. “Wow wow wow wow wow!”
&nbs
p; She grabbed James by the face, the gloves wet on his cheeks.
“You went upstairs?” James asked.
“Went upstairs? Went upstairs? James! It’s incredible. It’s the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen. There were dresses floating, beds with rippling sheets, vanities, and the closets…oh my goodness God the closets.”
Relieved to see her, and twice as glad to see her having so much fun, James started laughing.
“You’re really excited!”
“Excited? I can’t even…can’t even find the words. This is…this is…it’s…”
“Miraculous,” James said. Then he looked over the edge of the canoe to the roof. “Impossible.”
“It’s fabulous. It’s magic. It’s like the most important discovery ever made.”
Amelia was hardly aware that she was standing in the canoe. James balanced it with every excited gesture she made.
“We have to tell people,” she said. “We have to. How can we not?”
“Maybe we should.”
“No!” Amelia said, her eyes wild with revelation. “We can’t tell a soul. People will ruin it because that’s what people do.” She looked to the shore surrounding the third lake. “No. It’s ours. For now. For as long as we want it, it’s ours.”
“Okay.” James laughed. “I really need to check out the upstairs.”
“Oh yes you do. Oh yes you do.”
“How many rooms were up there?”
Amelia slipped out of the suit as she answered. James stared where the red fabric of her bikini bottom met her smooth skin.
“Seven? I think there are seven rooms up there. Three per side. And the center one. The dressing room. The powder room? I’ve never been in a room like it before. Dresses everywhere.”
“Wow.”
“Yes. Wow. I tried opening one of the windows. That one.” She pointed below. “I tried to wave up to you, but the hose…that was as far as it went.”
“You maxed out the hose?”
“I did.”
“Weren’t you scared of it breaking?”
“I wasn’t. I just didn’t care. James. It’s breathtaking. It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever ever ever seen.”
She was out of the suit now. Her half-naked body shone in the waning sun. James could count the droplets on her skin.
“Can’t we just spend the night?” she asked.
“What?”
“No,” she said, frowning. “I guess we can’t. But man…that would be amazing. To spend the night here. Inside. That’s impossible, right?”
James laughed.
“You really had a good time in there.”
“I did. I really did. I was scared. So scared. But I never felt unsafe. You know? What. A. Thrill.”
James saw epiphany in her eyes. It thrilled him right back.
“James,” she said, squatting in front of him. James tried not to look at her bikini bottom. “It’s what I’ve been looking for my whole life. It’s something so nonsensical that it makes fun of every sensible thing in the world. It’s impossible. But it’s here. Can we keep it?”
Can we keep it, James repeated in his mind. As if we’re dating. No longer just on a date. Now…dating.
“Yes,” he said, smiling. “We can keep it. And we’re going to keep it. And it’s ours.”
“Man,” Amelia said.
She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. Then her lips parted and James felt her delicate tongue snake upon his own.
When she pulled away from him, he was stunned speechless.
But Amelia was not.
“We need a second suit,” she said. “We need to go down there together.”
James nodded, as if breaking apart an unseen spell.
“We need to kiss again is what we need to do.”
Amelia looked at his lips.
They kissed again.
“We need scuba,” he said, when they pulled apart.
“Yes. Two suits. Should we take classes?”
They made plans to take lessons. They baked in the sun. They swam above the house. They paddled home.
They talked the entire way, all about the house. It was impossible to bring up anything else.
Uncle Bob was waiting for them on shore, his bare feet on the small sandy beach.
“What did you two do to my canoe?” he asked, staring at the chipped paint, the dents, the crazy diving suit between the benches.
James and Amelia looked quick to each other. James opened his mouth to lie but Bob held up an open palm.
“It doesn’t matter. You have no idea how many objects I broke before I turned twenty. You guys went diving?”
“Yeah.”
Uncle Bob shook his head, smiling.
“Crazy kids. Did you find anything cool?”
The sun shone on their burnt faces. Wonder shone in their eyes.
“No,” they said together at once.
19
They fell in love out there, on the third lake, beneath the surface, exploring the impossible house, diving together, improving the skills they learned in scuba class, eating lunches in the canoe, falling asleep in the canoe, sunning in the canoe, exploring each other’s bodies in the canoe, too.
Eventually they stopped looking at the shoreline altogether. The shoreline was too close to reality, part of that real world they left behind every time they visited the third lake and the house that stood at its floor. They weren’t quiet. They weren’t hiding.
They played.
They played house.
Uncle Bob didn’t ask again about the marks on the side of the canoe because James bought it from him before he could. Two dozen trips through the tight tunnel had stripped most of the green paint, leaving marks that might’ve been made by a giant water-cat, for all Bob knew. James saved up a hundred dollars working for his father, handed Uncle Bob the money, then handed him an additional ten bucks.
“What’s this for?” Bob asked, the sun making him squint that day.
“For docking it here at your place.”
“You don’t have to do that, James.”
“I know. But it’s really nice of you to let us keep it here.”
If Bob noticed any changes in the teenagers, he didn’t mention it.
But James and Amelia weren’t taking any chances. And if Bob or anybody else had asked what interested them so much about the lakes, about canoeing, both James and Amelia were prepared to lie.
“Lie,” Amelia said one afternoon, the sun high above the mountains. They dangled their arms over the sides of the canoe, their fingertips grazing the crisp water.
“Absolutely,” James said, his own eyes closed, his head resting on the front bench. They had books in the canoe, but neither read them. They were either down below or they weren’t. And when they weren’t they talked about being down below. “But it’d be easier if we didn’t have to…see everyone all the time.”
“Like at work.”
“Yeah. At home, too. You know what’s easier than lying about what you’re doing? Not seeing the people who are gonna ask you what you’ve been doing.”
Amelia turned to face him. She had an idea.
“What about a raft?”
James opened his eyes. He looked to shore, noted the trees. They’d talked before about wanting a pontoon, something big enough to sprawl out on.
“We could anchor it to the roof,” James said.
A bigger boat wouldn’t fit through the tight tunnel. But building a platform, out here, and leaving it, could be just as good.
Could be better.
“We’ll need an ax,” James said. “And a lot of wood. Rope. The strong stuff.”
“How big should we make it?”
“As big as we want to, I guess.” James
leaned forward and kissed her and the kiss lasted a long time. When he pulled away he was smiling. “You are awesome, Amelia. A raft.”
Without discussion, they got back into their wet suits, helped each other ready their tanks, secured their masks to their mouths, and dove into the third lake. Together they swam down to the half front door. They swam through the foyer, the dining room, the processions of lounges, and the kitchen as big as Uncle Bob’s cottage. They swam through the library, pausing at the bay window, shining their lights through the glass, pointing out fish that emerged from the murkiness, as bunnies might from a garden of flowers. They swam through every room on the lower floor and then, holding hands, they swam as fast as they could up the stairs, down the long hall with the single door. They swam into the dressing room and through the bedrooms and through an attic door in the second bedroom on the eastern side, swam up into the attic and through the tight eaves that wrapped around the attic like catacombs, like a single corridor, like the logical extension of the path they were on and had been since way back when Uncle Bob showed them the basics of the canoe he once owned. It all felt to them like the same moment, or perhaps, the same tunnel. Some parts were sunny, some were graffitied, but most of their journey was underwater, swimming deeper, deeper into the house.
20
They built the raft, a sturdy nine-by-six rectangle of uneven logs, held together with enough twine to form a second layer, a blanket of rope. They found their wood at the forested borders on shore. They dragged heavy timber through mud and overgrowth, carried them in tandem upon their shoulders, singing the song of the seven dwarfs. They cut one tree down. One. Because James believed the raft needed that one strong middle piece, so that if all else failed, if the rope somehow untied itself and all else drifted away, they’d still have that one solid trunk to hang on to, to rebuild around, to call home. They spent hours working, treading above the house, their bare feet close to the roof, almost close enough to stand on it. They took turns, exhausting themselves, laughing about it, debating it, happy to be making it, a place they could sleep, close to the house, so close that it was almost like owning it or maybe just like owning the house outright after all.
A House at the Bottom of a Lake Page 6