by Mira Gibson
Gertrude didn’t nag her about her seatbelt as she hit the gas, accelerating across, popping the clutch and upshifting in rapid succession, old childhood fears the bridge would give way and kill them rumbling in the back of her mind as loudly as the wooden slats under her Audi’s tires.
POW.
Gertrude startled the second she heard it. The gunshot cut through her foggy thoughts - the fragments and images of their bizarrely rehearsed and even more bizarrely executed confrontation with their parents that had been distracting her the entire drive home.
Doris’ didn’t have to confirm it'd been a firearm. They’d lived in Laconia their whole lives, born and raised, and the sound was unmistakable, though they usually heard the pops and bangs echoing in the afternoon and early evening, never at two in the morning, never a solitary shot, and never coming from the woods where hidden homes, the mysterious characters inside - agoraphobic and tucked away until death, neighbors they didn’t know existed until medics rolled them out in body bags - lay dormant.
Agitated by the disturbance and even more so by Doris’ incessant guessing - hunters? No, not at this time of year. Maybe a car backfiring? Didn’t sound like it. The Miller’s or Winona’s dad or that strange Chinese family that moved in last winter? - all verbal blows both given and received during their volatile screaming match with Mom and Dad now gone from her sister’s skittering mind. Gertrude realized she'd hit the gas, nerves roiling inside her, and the curve through Opechee would be a trick to control.
“Put on your seat belt!” Not liking the fatal rawness of her tone, she repeated herself anyway, as the tires shrieked against the grain of the bend and the fog thickened. The road was disappearing - it's a story and you know every word, rely on it, no need to see. - But Gertrude was wrestling down a sickening knot in her gut, the hot rush of bad tingles, her loosening bowels, an old reaction to weapons firing as though her body didn’t know what age she was, didn’t know she wasn’t a child, didn’t know the gun hadn’t gone off in the next room, didn’t know her sister was alive even though Doris was screaming at her to slow down from the passenger’s seat.
Her voice, shrill and desperate, cut through the noise of Gertrude’s time warp, “Look out!”
Billows of fog slipped over the windshield then a figure appeared, shadowy and unreal, the night telling a lie too complicated for her to make sense of. Were her eyes tricking her brain? White-hot panic disconnected her mind from her hands, from her foot. Two seconds after she slammed on the brakes, cutting the wheel hard, vehicle careening sideways, she understood her reflexes had been fast but unfocused.
The next thing she knew glass was shattering against her cheek - excruciating ringing in her ear, the Audi on its side, flying and scraping over asphalt. She was crushed - Doris: limbs loose, stretching, tucking, straining, the worst cry Gertrude had ever heard coming out of her like death clawing its way up her throat. And then she didn't feel Doris crushing her and then she did and then she didn't, slamming and disappearing, over and over. When she finally understood the vehicle was rolling, the crashing splash that followed had her once again bogged in woolly confusion.
Wet ice enveloped her. There was no air. Her skull was throbbing. Black water stung her eyes. She gasped then choked, coughing the lake out of her mouth, as she frantically felt for her seatbelt, feeling, feeling, following the nylon strap down to where it met with a hard square of plastic. From the corner of her eye, Doris’ chestnut brown hair waved at her. Her hand was lolling freely, loose and relaxed through the murk. Doris' body had a terrible ease to it, no fight, no tension as though her sister was no longer there.
Stiffly, muscling in slow motion, hands quavering in the cold, fingers numbing, breath held and lungs burning, Gertrude pressed the seatbelt release, yanking the nylon and when it gave, she drifted to the backseat, away from Doris. Strategies wouldn’t formulate, her thoughts as devouring and jagged as the freezing depths of the lake. She pushed off hard, swimming downward, hands tangling in Doris’ cardigan, searching for something real to grasp, her arms, her waist, anything to push her through the window and free them.
She thought she saw the nasty gleam of eyes studying her beyond the windshield, swamp creatures lurking, but those were only white starbursts of pain flaring behind her eyes, complicating her effort.
Releasing Doris’ sweater, she saw with her hands. Hard cloth? It was the roof. Plastic? It was the door, yes a handle, higher a lip, the windowsill. She kicked through the car window.
The nose of the Audi was at the bottom of the lake. Looking up she gleaned ripples in the distance. The surface. She kicked downward, hauling herself deeper, and grasped Doris’ arms through the open window.
Trusting that she had her sister well enough was a prayer at best, but her lungs were aching and her head was throbbing. Drowning was all too real.
She started kicking. Her legs felt like twigs ready to snap. Her hands were too numb to tell if she was still gripping Doris but the weight of her sister told her she had her. Half fighting, half surrendering to natural buoyancy, as lazy and gradual as it was, she rose to the surface and broke through with an exhilarated gasp but got a mouth full of water, splashed up by her flailing arm. She coughed it out and got her bearings. Stillness all around her - shimmering pinprick stars in timeless constellations, the lake still as meditation, Balsam Firs and White Pines stately at the water’s edge, the bloom of lights from the bridge in the distance, serenely oblivious to her dire straits, to Doris’. They were too far beyond civilization to be rescued.
Keeping her arm hooked firmly around her sister’s chest and their heads above water - Gertrude paddling, Doris’ limp and drifting, gurgles and splashes and monsters below - she came to the muddy shore.
Check for breathing, give mouth-to-mouth, pump her chest five times, check for breathing, give mouth-to-mouth, pump her chest five times. - But though Gertrude believed she was doing this, she’d already collapsed, unconscious beside her sister.
Copyright © 2015
Published by: Mira Gibson
All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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