by Joy Preble
Last fall, I figured it was just the adrenalin from all the danger we were in. Maybe it still is. I only know that when I see him, I want to be with him—even when some other, more sane part of me tells me this is ridiculous and dangerous. And that I already have Ben, who—as boyfriends go—is absolutely perfect in every single way.
But the stupid truth is that nothing with Ben ever feels as intimate as just standing next to Ethan—which is crazy, since I still barely know him. Not like Ben, who’s even memorized my work schedule. Not like Ben, who just almost died.
This is getting me nowhere, especially because the truth is that I need Ethan’s help.
“Tess is going to meet us. We need to circle back and pick her up at the Wrap Hut.”
“So I gathered.”
“And you two just need to get along. End of story.”
“Any other orders I need to follow?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“I imagine you will,” Ethan says. “I imagine you will.”
THURSDAY, 4:45 pm
ETHAN
What’s Carter doing?” Tess peers through the fence at the lifeguard who’d dived in after Ben.
“Looks like he’s still closing everything down.” Anne moves closer to Tess. The three of us are standing half hidden in the bushes that flank the back part of the fence. Behind us, the ground dips slightly. There’s a small stream at the bottom, and on its other side, over a wooden footbridge, is a subdivision of ranch-style houses. We’ve parked on a side street there and walked the quarter-mile or so to the pool.
We watch as Carter stacks some remaining lounge chair cushions in the storage tent and lowers and fastens the flaps. No one else is in sight. The police and firemen have gone. The other lifeguards too, it seems. We wait in silence until he finishes and approaches the gate. He pauses and looks back at the pool.
“Move.” I edge the girls back behind the bushes.
“Bossy.” Tess scowls at me.
“Shh.” Anne elbows her.
Tess elbows her back. “I am shushing. There’s no way that Carter can hear us from over there anyway.”
Well, he can if she keeps talking at that decibel. I have a fleeting thought about my favorite café in Prague—the one I was sitting at only last week, drinking black coffee and eating chocolate torte. Alone. And not necessarily unhappy about it.
Eventually, Carter locks the gate and disappears out of view into the parking lot. The pool stays quiet. No sign of the rusalka.
“What now?” Tess asks. “Climb over the fence? Just stand out here like three idiots? Do you guys even have a plan?”
I reach into my pocket for my pack of Marlboros and remember that I’ve quit smoking. Or rather, that I’m attempting to and mostly failing miserably. I leave the pack in my pocket.
“Has it ever spoken to you before?” I direct my question to Anne. “The rusalka?” We haven’t established much, but at least on that point, we’re in agreement. We know what Anne’s been seeing and what tried to hurt Ben.
“No.” Anne edges closer to the fence. “I’ve seen her three or four times, not counting today. The first time, she was sitting by the duck pond near my house. You know, Tess—that little one with the willow trees all around it. I was jogging with my dad. He stopped to tie his shoe, and I saw her. Her hair was wet—that’s the first thing I noticed. All that long, dark snaky hair.”
“Gotta take your word for it,” Tess says. “’Cause let me remind you—I’m not seeing what you’re seeing.”
Anne ignores the interruption. “I don’t think I even had time to process it, really, because then my dad stood up and looked straight at her. And I realized that he didn’t see her, only I did. Which was about to freak me out when she disappeared. Just like she did today over by the slide. She just wasn’t there anymore. I think that first time, I wondered if I’d just been seeing things. That’s how sudden it was.”
“You didn’t tell me.” I try to hold Anne’s gaze, but she looks away from me and back to the pool.
She shrugs. “You didn’t ask.”
“Well, that’s just ridic—”
“We should go in,” Anne interrupts me. “Carter’s gone. The place is deserted. If we want to look around again, let’s go. Otherwise, I’m just going back to work. Or to Ben’s.”
“Wow,” Tess begins. “You two—”
“Save it,” Anne tells her. “It’ll give both of you something to talk about the next time you’re talking behind my back.”
She doesn’t wait for either Tess or me to respond. She just turns and walks away, heading up the side fence toward the front gate.
“Boy,” Tess says as we follow behind Anne. “You really piss her off, don’t you?”
It seems pointless to disagree.
We reach the gate just as Anne places her hand over the padlock. “Let me try something.” Her voice is hesitant, but her eyes flash with excitement. “I—”
“Is it locked?” Tess asks. “Maybe there’s a—”
I hold up my hand. “Shh.”
“What is it with you two always telling me to—?”
I put my hand on Tess’s shoulder. “Quiet. Wait.”
Anne closes her eyes. I feel a slight buzzing, a stirring of the atmosphere. Without thinking, I close my own eyes and concentrate with her. It takes more for me these days. The shift to mortality has dulled the edges of my magic. The power has been slowly slipping from me, each day surprising me not by how much less I have, but at how much I miss what I once believed I didn’t want.
Still, the feel of it pulls me. There’s an excitement as the power draws inward, readies to push out and do my will. “Ya dolzhen,” I say without thinking. The old words slip from mouth. Ya dolzhen. I must. Foolish, I think. Foolish to waste what magic I have left on such a simple task. But foolish things sometimes feel good. Too good.
“Hey!” Anne’s voice registers her surprise. My eyes snap open. She’s felt it too—my power slipping into her, mingling with her own. Like those times last fall: when we used magic to open the door in my loft while Viktor’s whirlwind threatened to destroy us; when I stood with her on Tess’s front lawn, guiding her through a basic protection spell. My magic and hers, dancing inside both of us, intertwined and potent. Only this time, her power is stronger. And so—I realize as I stand there—is what I feel for her.
“Don’t do that,” she says. “That was seriously weird, Ethan. It was like you were…well, don’t do that,” she repeats.
“Look,” Tess says. If she’s aware of the odd intimacy of the moment, she doesn’t acknowledge it. She points to the padlock. It’s hanging open. The metal looks darkened—singed. “You’re a hoss, Anne. That was wicked awesome. So just exactly how long have you been able to lay your hands on a padlock and get it to open?”
“I know we probably could have just picked it or something, but I just wanted to—whatever. It’s open. I opened it. So now we look around, right?” Anne directs the question to me.
Like before, she doesn’t wait for an answer. She just pushes open the gate and walks in toward the pool.
THURSDAY, 5:20 pm
ANNE
So,” Tess says to me a few minutes later as she, Ethan, and I stand at the edge of the pool. The water laps lightly against the stairs in the shallow end. “See anything? Feel anything?”
I feel sort of silly. Kids sneak in here all the time. Ben is always bitching that in the mornings, when he opens up, he’ll find empty beer cans and cigarette butts and the odd roach clip or two left behind from some after-hours round of partying.
But sometimes whatever it is inside me just—well, needs to be used. It builds up, and if I don’t use it, I get sort of jumpy until I do. I haven’t told Tess this. Or Ethan. Mostly because it makes me sound like a supernatural junkie or something.
“No,” I say. “I don’t see or feel anything. If mermaid girl is here, she’s not showing herself.” I wince inwardly at how confident I sound—all joking and secure—w
hich is definitely not how I feel.
We poke around the pool area some more. Tess plops down cross-legged at the edge of the deep end for a while, staring intently into the pool like she’s doing some kind of meditation. Ethan and I scope out the bathrooms. I peek up the slide at the kiddy pool. Nothing. Nada. Zip.
Figures. You want to see supernatural stuff, and it gets all shy. “Hey!” I say to the rusalka, who’s gone all invisible on us. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Still nothing.
We let ourselves out the front gate. I’ve trashed the padlock beyond locking, so we leave it hanging there. Carter will probably get yelled at for leaving it open, but that will be about it.
I pull my cell out of my skirt pocket. It’s been buzzing up a storm since we got to the pool, but I’ve been ignoring it—which, let me say, is not something I’m programmed to do—but if we’re headed back, I guess it’s time for a little damage control. Or at least for me to figure out how cranky Mrs. Benson really is that I’ve cut out on her like this. Tess’s story, that Miss Amy had taken ill and I was the only one who could help her with the beginning tap class, probably sounded as contrived to Mrs. Benson as it did to me when Tess relayed it as she’d climbed into the car. “You totally owe me,” she’d said. “Especially since I had to lie to Amy, too, about why I wasn’t going to be there to teach my class.”
I thumb through the missed calls, then press voice mail. Two messages in, it’s clear that I’m in big trouble. Mrs. Benson has chosen the passive-aggressive method of dealing with my unplanned exit from work. She’s called my mother, who has uncharacteristically surfaced from wherever she’s gone this afternoon.
My mother’s voice message consists of, “Where are you? Call me. Amelia is really pissed at you. I can’t believe you’re screwing up this job after she was nice enough to give it to you.” Actually, she used a more colorful phrase than screwing up. Once she decides to be a less-than-model citizen, her language is one of the first things to go. Especially when she’s angry.
My father has left two messages: one asking me where I am, and the other asking me if I’d heard from my mother.
There are also two texts from Ben, the last one confirming that we’re still meeting at eight. Both of them end with xo.
I text Ben back, See you then, adding my own xo. We walk toward the footbridge to the Birnam Woods subdivision that spans the little stream. I wonder, not for the first time, how many residents ever think it’s sort of odd to name a housing development after the forest in Macbeth. But it’s not like there’s a ton of For Sale signs or anything. Everyone seems just fine living on Inverness Lane and Dunsinane Street. Maybe if they kept getting visited in their dreams by a witch named Baba Yaga, they’d think twice about buying a house on a street named after a play in which just about everyone dies and the three witches mess with Macbeth’s head until he goes crazy. Or maybe not.
This is what I’m thinking about when I see her. I stop so suddenly that Tess, walking too close behind me, smacks into my back. Ethan, walking on my right, stops too. I feel this happen rather than see it because I can’t really focus on anything but the woman in front of me. My heart leaps into my throat.
“What?” Tess’s voice is shrill, I register that much. “What do you—? Oh. Hey! I see her! This time, I see her! This is totally amazing. I actually—”
“Careful.” Ethan takes my hand and holds it so tightly that I almost yelp—except that my throat’s so tight with fear that no sound comes out.
The rusalka stands with her back to us on the far end of the wooden footbridge. Tiny droplets of water fly in the air as she combs her pale fingers through her dark hair.
“Tell me what you want,” I ask her. “Why do you keep following me around?”
“Stories within stories, Anne.” The rusalka stays where she is and turns her head ever so slightly as she speaks. “You’re a smart girl. Not like me. You’ll figure it out.”
Right.
“Kak vas zovut?” Ethan’s still gripping my hand, but he moves us a few steps closer to the rusalka.
I don’t know what’s said, but I know it’s a question by the inflection of his voice. I also know he’s speaking Russian, which makes sense if this really is a rusalka, and so far, I have no reason to believe otherwise. Possibly, I think, I should learn more than what I’ve taught myself from the Lonely Planet Russian phrase book I picked up a few months ago.
“What did you ask her?” I whisper.
“Her name. We need to know who she is. Kak vas zovut?” he calls to the rusalka another time. She still hasn’t turned around. “Your name. Please.”
“She’s the crazy woman who tried to kill Anne’s boyfriend.” Tess glares at Ethan. “Isn’t that everything we need to know?”
“No.” Ethan’s voice is a harsh whisper. “Names are crucial. Identity is crucial.”
I expect Tess to argue with him, but instead, she says, “Like in fairy tales? Like with that Rumpelstiltskin dude? Once the girl knew his name, he destroyed himself. You mean like that?”
“Well, yes.”
“You know,” Tess says, “you don’t need to sound so surprised, Ethan. It’s not like I don’t know anything.” She advances another step closer to the rusalka. “Hey! If you’ve got a problem, maybe we can help you. But not if you keep trying to drown people. And you need to tell us who you are, like Ethan just asked you. What’s your name?”
“It is what it is,” the rusalka says, “the name my mother gave me. Just as I gave my child her name. Just as all mothers do. Innocent names. Names to protect. Names to heal. Names of strength. This man you are with—he tells you correctly. And yet you choose not to listen, and he chooses not to see the truth. These are perilous faults, ones I understand all too well. What we love can be lost in an instant. What we name can still be taken from us. You must all listen carefully. You must see what there is to see.”
Tess starts to move closer still, but I grab her arm. Then we’re both shivering violently as the temperature of the air around us plummets. I’m freezing—as cold as I’d been in the pool. Colder. The only thought standing out in my head is this—I need to see the woman’s face. Why won’t she turn around? I’ve talked to her, and she’s followed me. I’ve seen her more than once. So why won’t she show me her face?
She doesn’t turn. She just flicks her head in a gesture that seems to say, Follow me. So we do. We cross the bridge and walk behind her along the far edge of the stream until it widens out into a pond. The air warms up some. The rusalka edges closer to the pond. Her dress trails behind her, the hem coated in mud, with tiny bits of twigs and brambles clinging to the wet sludge.
Fear and frustration morph inside me into what feels more like anger. “Just turn around!” I shout at her. “Let me see you, and then we’ll talk.”
“If that’s what you want,” the rusalka says. She walks to the pond’s edge and steps into the murky green water up to her ankles. Farther out, the pond is deeper—deep enough to canoe or swim. Or drown.
“Yes.” I edge my way down the grassy incline after her. But the black sandals I’m wearing have slick soles. I stumble, and only Ethan’s grabbing my arm keeps me falling. But it doesn’t keep me from gasping. Because when the woman in lilac finally swivels gracefully, I see that, impossibly, it’s not the rusalka whose face smiles at me. It’s my mother.
The lilac gown is gone. My mother stands in the Birnam Wood pond, brackish water lapping over her feet. She’s wearing black, slim-cut jeans, a white tee, and a snug-fitting, short denim jacket. The tops of her black ankle boots—the ones she bought last weekend in Nordstrom’s—peer out from the water. Her hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail. The rusalka had eyes as gray as storm clouds, but my mother has brown eyes like mine. They study me as I force myself to stop screaming. It’s not real, I tell myself. It’s not real. It can’t be real. It’s stupid, crazy magic just like everything else. It is absolutely not real.
“You’re not my mother,” I tell the pe
rson in the water. “You aren’t fooling me.” I can barely get the words out because my voice is shaking. All of me is shaking. It’s not real, I tell myself again.
The woman with my mother’s face smiles sadly at me. Her thin shoulders sag just a little as she stands there, and I see her move to straighten her posture. The motion is familiar and intimate, something my mother does all the time, probably without thinking. It’s another habit she’s started again since last fall. Every time I see her do it, my heart twists a little.
The woman who looks like my mother but isn’t backs up a little deeper. The pond water begins to fill her ankle boots as they disappear from view.
“Don’t believe it,” Ethan says. His voice is steady, but still I can hear an edge of panic underneath. “It’s a trick.”
“Foolish man,” the thing with my mother’s face tells him.
Then she turns and wades into the deepest part of the pond so quickly that I barely see her slip under the water.
“No!” I scream. I know it’s not real, and I can hear Tess yelling at me to stop, but I’m wading in after my mother anyway—wading up to my waist in the sludgy pond water before Ethan can grab me and pull me back. All I can see is the image of my mother disappearing in the water. It blends in my head with the image of Ben at the bottom of the pool. It doesn’t look like swimming. It looks like drowning.
The rusalka resurfaces as suddenly as she went under, floating on her back, arms stretched out. Still as death. It’s really her again, the lilac gown sagging beneath her, wild black curls dipping this way and that in the current. For one brief second, she raises her head, opens her eyes, and looks at me. “Please,” she says. “Oh, please help me.” And then she’s gone.