by Jason Brown
“Oh Paul, I thought he was finally coming back to us,” she said as she leaned unsteadily on my shoulder, and I said nothing.
My mother and I walked down the slope to where my father stood on the beach with his hands hanging open at his sides and his chin on his chest. The three of us joined the others looking out through the slate-gray haze. No one spoke, and not a breath stirred the smooth surface of the water.
THE LAKE
A hockey game started near shore, mostly fathers and sons and brothers in plaid jackets and blue caps, choosing sides according to size. Two boys set rocks two feet apart as a goal. It had rained and frozen over, the end of the season, and the ice was smooth.
One man raised his heavy arms and skated backward with his eyes closed, drifting out and around a rocky point where kids in the summer used a rope swing. He opened his eyes as he turned in a circle, watching the lake come into view, the gray sky above, and finally the pine forest. The chirps and scrapes of the hockey game drifted from around the corner as he skated farther out and saw a girl sitting with her stockinged knees pulled up and her mittens hoarded in her lap—Jacob Small’s youngest, Katie, watching him skate. The crisp air all but swallowed a cheer—someone’s goal—before it reached this skater who had just headed north when with an abrupt vanishing the ice gave way.
Underwater, his body convulsed. He thrashed once, but his gloved fist only grazed the ice before his limbs grew sluggish. He extended his hand, palm up, as he did every day at the store where he worked, waiting for the customer’s money, and he saw where the ice thinned along a crack leading to the hole where he had fallen through. But it was too late for this kind of clarity. The ice, a luminous gray cap, pressed down, and he pictured Jacob Small’s daughter, her small eyes watching the hole in the ice where he had vanished. He knew she would not come to the edge and reach into the water; she would not be able to without falling in herself. She ran errands to the store for her mother every other day, paying him for milk and bread, saying thank you. Otherwise he had known her only as a girl waiting for the bus with the rest, maybe standing slightly apart.
Katie Small could not stand up. For a few moments it was as if she were under water. She sat holding her breath and staring at the hole where Franklin Crawford had suddenly disappeared. She stood, ready to yell, but no one was close enough to hear her. Her new black boots crunched over the old path, breaking through the thin crust and snapping branches beneath before she was on the icy trail again slipping down the gentle slope toward the field behind the McKinley’s house, where tufts of hay stood shoulder-high out of the snow. She was only a hundred yards from the hockey game, but they couldn’t see around the point.
Dennis, her brother’s friend, stood in the McKinley’s driveway to the side of the barn kicking at something on the ground. He looked up when Katie came into view and looked right at her as he rarely did at anyone, even the girls in his own class, two years above Katie. She stopped running without realizing she had and stared at him. She rarely spoke to him when he came over to the house to see her brother. Dennis started running toward her over the thick snow of the field, raising his knees high in the air. In moments he stood beside her, brushing his pants.
“Why aren’t you down playing hockey?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said and stomped his heel into the packed trail. At night kids Dennis’s age, Dennis himself, came down this trail to drink beer in the woods. In the steam of Dennis’s breath, at the sight of his red palms fumbling with a handful of snow, she had forgotten Franklin.
“I gotta go,” Dennis said and ran off toward the lake, leaving her alone. Her legs wouldn’t move. She saw the boys on the lake weaving in circles chasing a black dot. Mothers stood by a coffee thermos someone had brought down to the edge. Katie slipped once on the snow bank next to the road. Her mother and father were nowhere in sight; she saw her brother Jamie, out on the ice, his cheeks red and mouth gaping open, a look of abandoned excitement in his eyes as he prepared to defend the goal. Mrs. Johnson was the first person she reached. Katie pulled on her arm, but Mrs. Johnson was yelling to her son out on the ice to put his hat back on.
“Just a minute, hon,” she said to Katie and screeched at her son again, who paid no attention.
A voice on the other side of the game rose above all the noise. “Someone has gone under the ice. Someone has gone under!” Everyone fled for shore and stumbled around in the snow on their skates as if suddenly crippled at the knees. Parents groped through the crowd for their children while a few of the men began running for their trucks and some rope. Mrs. Johnson left to find her other son while Katie stood still until her mother grabbed her arm and shook her.
“You scared me!” her mother shouted, eyes darting around as if the lake might reach out and steal Katie from the shore.
Someone shouted Franklin’s name.
“Franklin Crawford,” Katie’s mother said. “He lived in an apartment above Dawson’s.”
Katie’s father seemed to know no better. He read aloud from the Crier, nodding his head at what they all knew. Katie sat at the table counting the crackers she had not used in her soup as her mother opened the door to the stove. Inside, a pile of orange coals the size of eyeballs glowed brighter as cool air from the kitchen rushed in. Katie pictured Franklin on the bottom of the lake, his body green and gray, half rotten, jaw hanging by loose threads, dark empty sockets reflecting the world to which his soul had traveled.
Franklin’s aunt told the reporter from the Crier that she thought he had a few friends other than the townspeople and those who lived around the lake. Yet no one in town seemed willing to come forward and admit to being his friend. She said he often went off on benders in other states where no one knew him at all. It was true he once spent six months in a county jail in New York state on charges of assault. This was news to people. He had never shown signs of this potential for deceit and violence in their village. People had always assumed Franklin was slotted to inherit his aunt’s house and money, though she claimed never to have intended this at all. In fact, she told the reporter, she planned to live another sixty years, at least, and by then there would be nothing left of her money or her house. She would be one hundred and thirty.
There was no sign of the body all winter. When the ice melted, state people appeared with outboard boats and divers—a big commotion—but they found nothing.
“Surely they will find him,” Mrs. Small said one morning.
Mr. Small didn’t stop reading the paper. “If they dredged for him and didn’t find anything, he’s not down there. He probably went down river. There’s a strong current down there.”
“He could be caught on something at the bottom.” Her mother spoke idly, as if about one of her crossword puzzles.
Her father added, “I don’t want you children swimming in there until this business is over.” None of the children were present, however, except for Katie.
It only rained a couple times all spring. When the air grew warm in early June, kids collected by the rope swing after school, though not as many jumped because the water was low. Mostly the boys jumped. They claimed to know where the rocks were.
Dennis backed up with the rope in his hand, swinging out and up, rising and turning straight into the air. He waved as he came around to face the shore, and for a moment Katie felt her eyes lock with his before he pointed his toes and sliced into the water. The other kids on the shore paid no attention, but Katie stared at the small patch of swirling bubbles marking the spot where Dennis had gone under. She had stepped forward enough to be noticed by two girls, who stopped talking and glared at the intruder. This was the older crowd. With a crash, Dennis’s arm rose out of the water followed by his head.
“Franklin’s got my leg!” he screamed and went back under. The girls to Katie’s right chuckled, the one leaning back in her bikini and running a red-nailed finger over the tiny hairs leading up to her belly button.
This time Dennis waved both arms in the air.
>
“He’s dragging me under! Someone help!”
Dennis swam under water to the edge and sprang out, his smooth, narrow chest glistening as he sauntered over the roots and pine needles to sit next to the two girls. He looked right through Katie as if she wasn’t there; if he had looked again she would have been gone.
She sat down in the same spot where she had seen Franklin. She was the last one to see him alive; no one knew this. How much time had passed, she wondered, between when she saw him go under and when she reached Mrs. Johnson? Ten minutes? She had moved so slowly, as if walking to school, or to take in the laundry, or waist-deep through water at the beach in the summer. It felt as if she were still moving this slowly, still arriving too late.
Dennis came over, as he did almost every day after school, and stomped upstairs to the third floor to see her brother. After Katie finished helping her mother with chores, she went up to her room to write a letter to her friend, Julie. For six months now Katie had been sad about her best friend moving away with her parents to Vermont. Katie had asked her mother if she would drive her to Julie’s new house, but her mother was too busy. So was Julie’s mother. Katie had been writing every afternoon since Julie left, but Julie’s letters had trickled down to every three weeks. Katie didn’t care; she would write Julie if Julie didn’t write back at all. She wrote her about what she was thinking and about what people were doing around the lake. According to Julie’s last letter, however, Katie didn’t like people very much. Katie was currently thinking about what she would say. She couldn’t remember exactly what she had said in many of the previous letters. Julie had them now. Katie loved those letters so much she wanted them back. It made her sad, thinking of them out there in the state of Vermont. They weren’t hers anymore. She almost wanted them back more than she wanted Julie back. Julie seemed to know this.
In this day’s letter she admitted to Julie she was maybe not so interested in people. She was thinking about what she had seen happen to Franklin. She could not remember feeling anything when Franklin disappeared. She wanted to tell someone what she had seen now almost as badly as she had the afternoon she saw it happen, which was so long ago it seemed as if she had imagined the whole thing. She was afraid, she realized, that someone would find out she had been the first one to see him go under and that she could have run faster along the path, that she had stopped when she saw Dennis—this boy she saw almost every day, who was unremarkable (Julie agreed) in all ways. Then people would know what she was really like. Sometimes when she closed her eyes, she wrote, she was afraid everyone would vanish, even Julie, and she would be alone next to the lake where her grandparents and great grandparents had lived. Julie had said before she left that Katie should not think too much before she wrote and never rewrite anything. If she just wrote down what she was thinking as it came out, then it would be as if they were still together talking. Maybe so. The letters seemed to create the shadow of a parallel life. She wondered, though, if Julie would stop reading her letters, if she would just start stacking them in a box.
The warm sun made her feel like one of the summer people who walked by the shore with ice cream dripping down their wrists. No one talked of Franklin anymore; it was as if he had never existed. This was a relief but also strange, as if she expected to see him appear around the corner at school or from behind a sheet on the clothesline. He was still there, she felt, watching how she took every step and breath for granted, as if she deserved this life.
After helping her mother, she walked down to the public landing. Young kids ran up to their knees in the lake and stopped as thunder crashed. It was sunny, but a storm was coming. Mothers of the kids looked up as gray clouds inching across the sky flowed into the valley. The sailboats out on the lake lost the wind. The sailors sat upright, not speaking, staring across the glassy surface, the sails flopping lazily back and forth. Katie stayed even after the mothers packed up the kids and took them home.
Thunderheads rolled up over the hay fields and burst out into the open blue sky above the lake. Within minutes, rain sheeted across the water, moving in a line toward her with the wind, which brushed through the oak and birch and pine. Lightning streaked to some point on the far shore, followed by an echoing boom traveling down the valley. Katie ran from the beach to the porch of her house as rivers formed along the roadside and rushed down toward the lakefront. The sky had emptied a bucket, and then it stopped. She stood on the porch and looked through the rising steam at the clearing sky where a faint mist appeared before the blue, and the light shimmered off the still-soaked oak leaves and grass, creating spots in her vision when she looked away.
Dennis stayed the night. The music thumped above in her brother’s room until their mother made them turn it off at eleven. Later, Katie heard her brother’s feet creaking down the stairs to the kitchen and back up again. Katie slept with just a sheet and her underwear it was so hot, and even though the window was open, no breeze came in off the lake. With the sheet pulled off, the air didn’t move against her skin. On a night like this it would be almost dawn before the lake cooled the air, and until then sweat glistened her face and neck and finally, late, a breeze did lift the curtains, the center of the white drapes rising into potbellies. As her bedroom door pulled open, the bellies rose up and lost their balance. The cool air pricked her skin and lips, and there stood Dennis in his white T-shirt, skinny arms dangling and jaw loose. She closed her eyes and held them closed against the urge to see what he would do before he did it. At school she saw him strutting in the hall as if he weighed two hundred pounds. He stood above her now, the electricity of his eyes raising tiny hairs on her arms and neck. He worked for his father, a carpenter, during the summer and some weekends, and even from across the room she could feel the calluses on his hands and the way his lower lip protruded when his mouth hung open, most of the time, and the way his eyes, set close together, always seemed surprised and afraid of being reprimanded. Yet he stood across the room moving an inch at a time over the two-hundred-year-old pine boards, trying not to wake her. The square-head nails creaked as the breeze brushed over her skin, over her hips and eyelashes. Without warning (she had imagined him approaching forever, never arriving) he was there, breathing unsteadily, his hands poised just above her stomach like heavy air. He rested them lightly over her stomach and ribs. She opened her eyes a crack and saw him kneeling over her with his eyes closed and head bent, like her mother waiting for the sacrament on Sundays, only his hands were turned down.
He left quickly. By the time she looked around, there was no sign of him. His footsteps were less careful in their retreat, shuffling across the floor overhead. The weight of his body pressed into the springs of the bed in her brother’s room.
In the morning she lay on top of the covers until she heard her mother and father downstairs. Her two oldest brothers drove off and finally Dennis and Jamie trundled down the steps. The screen door slammed behind them. Rising, she felt heavy, her head pressed in. Her mother was too busy at the sink to turn around; her father was doing inventory at the store. The boys sat down on the porch railing, facing each other, and Dennis swung his legs.
“It takes an hour?” her brother said, continuing some conversation, but Dennis didn’t answer. He pulled on his lip with his teeth, as if thinking about it, and Katie knew both what they were talking about and the answer to the question. It took a half hour to drive to Vaughn on the other side of the lake. But they had no car.
“Hey,” Dennis said, suddenly speaking to her. She just stared back.
Dennis swung his legs to the other side of the railing, stood on the edge, and leapt off. He was gone. Her brother waved before turning on her.
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s my house, too.”
He seemed resigned, staring at the porch floor. Every boy his age was obsessed with getting around the lake to Vaughn. She didn’t understand why. She had been there, as they all had, in the car with their mother. There were more people there, more car
s, a row of stores.
She turned and went back inside to the kitchen. Her mother said she was a difficult person. She went to the downstairs bathroom and looked in the mirror for outward signs of this trait, and there saw two white globes in her head, and within the white, two green circles, and at their center black dots, clear as pools of oil, reflecting her round face and wide nose.
“Mom,” she said loud enough for him to hear. “Jamie is planning to walk to Vaughn.”
“Good luck.”
Katie sat down at the table.
“Some day,” her mother said, arriving at the table with a box of cereal and a bowl but no milk, “you’ll be asking me to take you there.”
“No.”
“Wait and see.”
The train whistled two miles away. In the summer it passed slowly.
Katie helped her mother hang sheets behind the house. It didn’t take long before they were done, and her mother went back inside, and Katie walked across the road to the town dock where she sat with her legs dangling in the water. Dennis appeared and walked with both hands in his pockets, hips swaying, down to the edge of the lake where he picked up a stone, looked at it for a moment, and tossed it medium distance into the water. He picked up another, larger one, and turned it over in his palm before tossing it farther out. The splash threw a small cape of water. He stood with one hip cocked, hands in his pockets again, watching the ripples spread.
When he bent over to squat, his sunburned skin pulled tight around his spine and wiry back muscles. He didn’t say anything but just looked out across the lake in the general direction of Vaughn.
“I’m gonna hop that train,” he said.
“To Vaughn?”
“Nah. It goes farther than that. It goes across the whole country.”
She pictured long flat stretches of plains with boxcars inching across, her legs dangling out of the open doorway, swinging in turn to the click-click of the wheels against the track. How long would that take, she wondered? No water in sight. Nothing to drink. Her mouth was dry from the thought.