When they were finished, when the last knot was tied, Amelia secured one end of independent rope to the jutting end of the center log and James went under, swimming the rope around the home’s short chimney, tucking it under the brick ridge at its zenith. It felt great, he told Amelia when he broke the surface again, sending ripples toward the canoe (toward the raft, too), felt like they had done yard work, or built an extension, or, at the very least, had added.
“An addition to the house,” Amelia said, laying a mattress pad and a blanket on the uneven logs.
James secured the canoe to the rope that held the raft to the house.
Then they sat on the edge of their raft and let their bare feet and ankles dangle in the water.
Amelia kissed him. She grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him until he leaned back, until he was lying down. She crawled upon him and kept kissing him and then James kissed her in return, running his hands over her shoulders, her lower back, her legs. The sun baked them from above as she straddled him. She took his hands and placed them on her breasts. James was breathing hard, tracing their shape beneath her bathing suit, squeezing them, kissing her neck. Amelia reached behind her back and untied the top, letting it slip past her shoulders, letting it fall to the logs that supported them. James kissed her breasts, tasted the lake water, wondered if every moment with Amelia would forever come coupled with the taste of the third lake.
They slid closer to the edge of the raft, James’s hands upon her ass now, trying to roll her over, wanting so badly to get on top of her, to spread her legs apart, to feel the strength of her thighs against his body. He kissed her neck and shoulders and arms and eyelids and everything that showed. Amelia moaned in response and James finally did get her to lie down, on her back, and he bent at the waist to kiss her side, her thigh, to bite her. With his head toward the house, he looked over the edge of the raft, through the surface of the water, where the sun struck the roof, and he saw a single eye, looking back up at him, somebody crouched upon the roof of the house.
“Oh fuck!” James said, shoving himself toward the middle of the raft, away from the edge, away from Amelia, away from the water.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Amelia was up quick and on her knees now, crawling to the raft’s edge. She saw the eye flitter, then vanish.
She stared. James crawled beside her and stared with her. Their shoulders touched but rather than feeling safe for being so close, they both leaned away from the contact.
Darkness below. Nothing on the roof.
Then a plop three feet from the raft and both screamed as a fish leapt out and sank quickly back into the water.
“Jesus!” James yelled.
There was a pause between them. As the water settled.
Then they both started laughing.
James had a hand on his naked chest and was alternately laughing and breathing hard, the way people do when they’re not scared anymore, but some of the fright remains.
“Jesus,” Amelia said. “You scared the shit out of me!”
“Well, I really thought I saw something for a second there.”
“So did I. I saw a fish eye.”
“So did I.”
They laughed again. Amelia didn’t make to cover her breasts and James couldn’t stop looking at her. Didn’t want to stop looking at her. They got on their bellies, side by side, their faces suspended over the edge of the raft. The sun was hot on their backs and their reflections were dark and rippling.
“Maybe it’s a good thing that happened,” Amelia said, speaking to James’s warped reflection. James understood what she meant.
How close had they been?
Amelia breathed deep.
“You think we should do it in there?”
James stared at her dark reflection. Her eyes sparkled for a beat, then went black again.
“In the house?”
“Yes. Why not? It’s special to us.”
Special to us. This was true, but James could hardly believe they were talking about it at all, let alone the where of it.
“Our first time,” he said. It would be the first time for either of them. “In the house.”
“Yes.”
He looked at her.
“That’s possible, right?” he asked. “I mean…underwater…people can do that?”
“I think so.”
Both seventeen. Both virgins. But both saying yes.
“Yes. Okay. Let’s do it.”
“Yes.”
They didn’t do it that day. Instead, they swam, they explored, they made adjustments to the raft, they ate lunch, they ate dinner, and they slept, for the first time, floating upon the third lake, in the darkness, listening to the crickets and frogs, a small symphony of life, crying out from the shoreline at the base of the mountains. They heard fish break the surface, plop back into the water. They thought of the oscillating eye they’d each seen down close to the roof. They watched the moonlight and were mesmerized by the patterns it made. There were hypnotic patterns in everything out there. The sounds, the smells, the sights. And the feelings, too, of holding each other, under a thin blanket, drifting.
But not from the house.
Drifting to sleep.
Tethered to the house.
Tied.
“I love you, Amelia,” James whispered. But Amelia was already asleep. Already floating, in the middle of the third lake.
21
Amelia woke to the sound of splashing. But not quite splashing. More the sound of someone or something emerging, pulling itself out of the water.
Her left arm was asleep. She’d been lying on it. This always happened when she fell into a deep sleep. So she rubbed her arm, shook it, tried to bring it back to life. James snored lightly on his back. She could see the tip of his nose in the moonlight. The rest of him was in shadow.
Amelia sat up. The water’s surface was partially twinkling with scant moonlight. She could hear gentle waves lapping against the raft.
James rolled onto his side and fully vanished from sight. Like he’d wrapped himself up in the shadows, cold without them.
Amelia scanned the shoreline.
What woke her?
A fish, no doubt, just like the fish they’d seen leap near the raft after spotting its eye below the surface. Just a fish (no doubt). Except maybe a little doubt. A drop at least. Because it sounded like someone had either gotten out of the water or lowered themselves back in.
She watched for movement.
She listened.
She looked over James, beyond the edge of the raft, to where she knew the house to be.
Tethered, they hadn’t drifted, couldn’t drift anymore.
But there was no sparkle of moonlight, no light at all over where the house must be, and Amelia saw nothing.
She reached for her wet suit and paused.
What was she thinking of doing? Diving at night? And if so…would she tell James?
I just wanna know what made that sound. That’s all.
But it was a strange motivation. What were the chances that the same fish that had woken her would be swimming through the halls of the house?
The vision of herself below, buried by all that moonless black, alternately thrilled and worried her. She wasn’t sure why this should bother her at all. It wasn’t any lighter inside the house during the day. Their flashlights provided 100 percent of the light they used. So…what was the difference between diving at noon and diving at night?
Possibly, Amelia thought, it was knowing that the world above was as dark as it was below, two layers of blindness, night upon night.
Endless black.
And yet…the stars. Not as bright as she would’ve liked, but they certainly gave her something.
She looked to the edge of the raft, beyond her bare feet. Sh
e looked to shore. She looked to the surface of the lake, to the large area of impenetrable black that seemed to hover above the house (our house) like it was made of something more than water.
What was it about the stars that, no matter how they lit up the night sky, they couldn’t remove the night?
Amelia stood up, carefully, aware that she could lose her balance, could misjudge the boundaries of the raft, could slip into the water.
This vision of her white body breaking the surface, herself as the one shimmering object in all this darkness, a beacon for whatever called the lake home, the lamp that the moths must get to.
She didn’t like it.
Why not? Stop it. You’re not scared. You love it here.
A stronger wave arrived and the canoe rocked audibly, tethered three feet away. She knelt at the edge of the raft and reached for the rope that held it. Then she drew it in, hand over hand.
As the canoe came closer, as its silhouette looked something like a dorsal fin, she realized fully that she was planning to check if their things were still in it. Clothes. The cooler. Books. As if they’d left their car unlocked outside a shopping mall, and not here in the middle of an otherwise uninhabited lake.
The canoe came the rest of the way too quick and banged hard against the raft. The sound of it made her jump.
You’re not scared.
Amelia pulled the canoe broadside and reached in and felt for the cooler, their towels, their bags, their tanks, masks, and flippers.
She found the flashlights.
That’s what you were looking for the whole time, wasn’t it? Light.
She lifted one out of the canoe and turned it on.
She did not scan the canoe, James, or that starless patch of black that seemed to float above the house. Rather, she immediately trained the beam on the end of the raft, to where she believed she’d heard the sound that woke her.
“Fuck.”
Beads of water shone at the foot of the logs, beyond James’s feet and close to where her toes must have been when she was still asleep. She crawled to them, her hair hanging inches above the raft’s edge.
In the light, they looked like tiny puddles. Proof that something had recently stood there.
Stood there?
Amelia didn’t like the thought so she stopped thinking it.
You’re not scared. You’re sleeping on a raft in the middle of a lake. Things are going to get wet.
And yet…
She bent her arm in a way so that she could come at the droplets from the lake’s side of the edge. She dipped her fingertips into the tiny puddles. Then she laid her hand flat upon them. In a way, it fit. As if Amelia had made the watermarks herself. Or like someone had been holding on to the side of the raft, their legs dangling in the dark below.
Amelia inched away from the edge of the raft.
Stop it. You are not scared.
She’d heard of people, adults usually, intentionally turning a good thing into a bad thing. When things were going good, adults liked to ruin them. Her own mom called it a self-fulfilling prophecy. And you did it to prove to yourself that it wasn’t so good to begin with.
All this, the lake, James, the house…this was a good thing.
So why was Amelia trying to ruin it?
She inched back to the mattress pad, sat, held her knees to her chest, scanned the shoreline. She turned the flashlight off, like she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, didn’t want to be the only thing lit up in all this darkness.
Night upon night. Darkness within. Darkness without.
The raft rose on a small wave and settled, tethered to a buried house.
“James?” she whispered, reaching into the shadows and tapping his shoulder.
James stirred.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“James, what are these?”
“What are what?”
She shone the light on the edge of the raft. For a crazed beat she imagined someone might be there, a pair of wet eyes where the wood ended and the lake began.
James sat up.
“Those?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s water,” he said.
“But how’d it get there?”
James thought about it. He wasn’t scared. Amelia needed that.
“The canoe must’ve drifted. Hit the raft. Splashed it a little.”
Amelia nodded.
“A lot of water out here,” James said.
“Yes.”
James got on his back again and fell immediately asleep. But Amelia stayed up, listening to the sound of the unseen waves lapping against the raft. Trying not to imagine them as fingers, or heads even, something with hands that hovered by the wood, waiting for her to sleep again, waiting for the darkness within her to match the darkness without.
22
Following Amelia through the house, the flippers propelling, James thought: She’s the coolest girl you’ve ever met.
More than the bravery it took to explore the house was the fact that they were now spending nights on the raft.
Behind his mask, James smiled. He shone his beam in a circle around her until it looked like she was swimming through a ring of fire. She was performing for him; weaving through the halls, the rooms, up the stairs and down, through the attic, the bedrooms, and even sometimes above the seaweed gardens outside.
He owed a lot to this house. It’d given him something incredible to show her.
Still following her, he thought of her half-naked body and the dozens of times he’d seen it. How soft her breasts felt in his hands, how sweet she tasted, the weight of her pressed upon him on the raft.
Could today be the day they lost their virginity in the house? And was it up to him to bring it up?
Maybe…
Ahead, Amelia took a sudden left, entering the thin hall that connected the study to the kitchen, the vast magnificent kitchen with not one but two marble islands, where knives remained in their holders, the stove looked ready to use, and the cupboards were stocked with dishes, glasses, serving plates, and bowls.
All of it stationary. As if found in the kitchen of any dry home.
Glue? James asked himself. Rope?
But no hows. No whys.
Because of their one rule, their clubhouse guideline, James hadn’t examined the dishes close enough to know what held them in place. In his father’s hardware store, they stocked sixteen types of glue. There was Glasgow wood glue strong enough to hold a cabin together. But you couldn’t even hang a child’s drawing on your wall with Duncle’s. And the store had everything in between. In fact, James’s dad would have so much to explain down here, his head might explode from the excitement.
But would the pieces of his head fall to the floor…or scatter freely about the house?
No hows. No whys.
Amelia said the house was kind of like the Garden of Eden. Neither of them gave a hoot about religion, but the analogy was spot-on.
Don’t eat the apple. Not down here.
But at seventeen years old, James was curious. He was far from the age when childhood’s magic might return, far from being an old man who didn’t want to ask questions, who happily accepted the unknown and all mysteries.
Probably it was because he spent most days talking to people about how things are put together, the best way to build, the best wood, tools, rubber, and glue.
His father’s hardware store constantly asked how and why.
It’s how it survived. It’s why it existed.
Home improvement.
Home.
And how one stays together.
Ahead, Amelia exited the kitchen by way of a spiral staircase that led to one of the bedrooms upstairs.
James didn’t follow her.
Bringing
his arms and legs up, he pushed himself to a stop. Bubbles rose from his face mask. He treaded above the two kitchen islands for a full minute. He thought about Eden. Then he lowered himself to the tiled kitchen floor.
On the counter was a small porcelain beaver. The three small holes on its back told James it was a pepper shaker.
Why isn’t it floating? What’s holding it down?
Training his light on the animal’s teeth, James could sense the darkness behind him. It felt as if the entire house of darkness fanned out from this one point, this pepper shaker that somehow stayed put on the kitchen counter.
Somehow.
The beaver’s wide eyes seemed to stare up into the light.
James ran a finger along its back, over the holes.
He gripped it between his forefinger and thumb.
How.
He tugged.
For a beat it felt like it was going to come up with his hand. James could see the teeth, the eyes, the flat tail rising from the counter like any rational object should.
But it didn’t move at all.
James’s vision wasn’t the best through the mask but it was good enough. Floating above the kitchen floor, he bent at the waist and examined where the shaker met the counter.
Being in the business of adhesives and tools, James had seen a hundred broken objects. He’d be able to spot a fix from across the kitchen. But there was no sign of glue at the base of the beaver.
James looked to the exit, to where he’d last seen Amelia swimming. For a breath he thought he saw her, arms crossed, eyes alight, no mask, no tank, no suit, watching him from across the kitchen.
He felt some shame for doing what he was doing.
He pulled on the shaker again. Harder this time.
No give.
No wiggle.
The shaker did not move.
James pulled a pocketknife from the small pouch secured around his waist. He popped it open. Holding the light with one hand, he wedged the knife where the shaker met the counter. He dug at it.
His flippers rose up behind him as he worked, until he was floating horizontal to the counter, his mask only a few inches from the beaver’s teeth.
A House at the Bottom of a Lake Page 7