by Jason Brown
“I don’t know why you want to go,” she said.
He said she should come out with him in his brother’s canoe to see the airplane at the bottom of the lake, if she hadn’t seen it before, and she hadn’t. She’d heard about it, as everyone had. Her mother said there was no such thing at the bottom of the lake, but the story was that thirty years before a seaplane had crashed into the lake and killed all four people aboard.
They found his brother’s canoe hidden in the bushes over by the rope swing. The lake, Dennis explained, was low enough this year so they could see the plane on the bottom. He had seen it himself, just the day before, with his brother.
He pushed them off in the aluminum canoe, and after twenty minutes, he moved sideways in his seat, the paddle across his knees, the skin around his stomach in fine tight folds. He closed his eyes and shrugged one shoulder as water slowly dripped off the blade of the paddle. She couldn’t tell if they were there or if he was taking a rest.
“During the week you work for your father?” she said.
“Yep.”
She pictured him stacking boards and cleaning up scrap lumber from early in the morning until dinner.
“I’m supposed to be helping him today.”
“Why aren’t you?”
“Didn’t feel like it.”
“Isn’t he going to be mad?”
“Guess so.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
“Nothing. I’m not going to tell him nothing.”
“So where’s the airplane?”
“We’re right on top of it. Go ahead. Look down.” He was trying not to be proud of himself.
She didn’t want to look down. She didn’t expect it to be here, right under them.
“Go ahead, look down,” he said again, and she did because she didn’t want him to think she was scared. There was nothing beneath the flat surface but green, and flecks in the green, drifting in the sunlight.
“Don’t you see it?”
Just as he said this she did see an outline, possibly a wing. When she looked harder there may also have been something attached to the wing, and she looked away quickly.
When the canoe drifted out of the sunlight, she saw the full shape of the plane, pale against the dark mud and algae of the bottom. Dennis stood up and dove into the water, his legs kicking down until she had to look away her heart pounded so fast. For a moment she was outside her body, above the lake looking down at herself, a girl she didn’t know, sitting alone in a canoe. There were other people on the lake, but in her mind she was looking at a girl in a canoe alone on a lake. It had never seemed odd before to live next to such a large body of water, like a glassy eye peering up out of the earth.
“Almost made it.” He breathed frantically, water spurting out of his mouth and his eyes bulging slightly out of their sockets, as if they were starved for air. His neck stretched, his mouth widening, and he was under again, his long pale limbs pushing against the water like the slow glide of a great blue heron landing on the lake in the hazy dusk. Then she could no longer distinguish his body from the body of the plane. He rose, eyes closed, arms at his sides and legs kicking. His face was blissful and beautiful, as if in sleep. His arms burst over the gunwale, tilting the canoe so Katie had to lean the other way.
“I saw the cockpit.” He wheezed and coughed, gulping for air. “I saw into the cockpit. Nothing was there. Do you wanna come down and see?”
She shook her head.
“I didn’t bring my bathing suit.”
He looked off toward the beach. Maybe someone was there. Someone he’d rather be with. She wasn’t about to look. It didn’t matter. He might as well go over there.
“How you going to get back in the canoe?”
He shrugged and kept looking across the lake.
“You sure you don’t want to come in?”
“I don’t have my suit.”
He seemed not to hear.
“How you going to get up?”
“Easy.”
“It doesn’t look easy to me. You’ll tip the canoe over.”
He pushed off, watching her as he sank back into the water: first his shoulders, then his neck and the back of his head, his chin and finally his eyes, still open, sinking. He was gone. She could not see the blurry outline of his body beneath the water. Without warning, he rose over the high stern and pressed down, the muscles in his arms bulging. He tumbled over the seat and collapsed sideways on the bottom with his rib cage expanding and contracting, the water rolling off his skin.
For a moment he seemed to stop breathing and hold absolutely still.
She leaned over to touch the knob of his shoulder. It was colder than she expected, like the hard edge of an underwater rock. He lay with the side of his head pressed against the bottom of the canoe.
“I can hear the lake humming,” he said.
He sat up abruptly and gazed off in the direction of Vaughn.
“I’m planning on getting outta here,” he said.
“You mean to Vaughn?”
“No. I already been there. I’m gonna keep going.”
“Where?”
“Don’t know yet.”
Dennis hardened his jaw and flexed his toes.
“You going to jump the train?”
He nodded.
But she knew he wasn’t going anywhere. He would just talk about it, like her brothers.
She woke before sunrise and sat up in bed. The train whistle had woken her, though she hadn’t heard it. Now she could hear the faint rumble in the distance of the train passing out of town. She sat in her room at her desk with a pen poised above paper, trying to think of what to write Julie. For the first time, she had nothing to say. She felt empty, like skin filled with water.
Dear Julie,
I have decided to leave this place. If you receive no more letters from me for a long time it is because I am no longer here.
I promise to look for you in the future, in Vermont or wherever you are.
There is no need to write back your promise. Whenever you get this letter, and read it, just say, “I promise.”
She thought for a minute more.
We promised before you left to always tell each other the truth. You are the only one I have ever promised that to. Last time I wrote that maybe I didn’t like people, but it’s not true that I don’t like you. I love you. Just like we said to each other before you left. But the reason I have to leave here is that a man is dead. I didn’t mean it at all.
She collected some clothes in her backpack and waited for her mother to step out of the kitchen, then walked out the front door and down the steps. Her brother Jamie and her oldest brother were down by the lake. Her oldest brother stood apart, not wanting to be too close to the younger one, and she passed to the right, into the woods, to avoid being seen by any of them. Her mother stood behind the house next to the clothesline. For a moment she expected to be caught, but when her mother leaned over the laundry basket Katie rushed across the McKinley's field to the lake trail.
When the shore grew rocky and steep, she turned inland into the woods, uphill over sudden oval hollows where trees had been uprooted so long ago that they had rotted into the earth, their sprawling roots hanging in the air. She was led forward by the patches of light filtering through the canopy of oak leaves and floating in curtains of dust and pollen, the air itself surprised, caught in the act of holding the light. She headed down a slope to the narrow trickle of a stream and ran up the opposite slope, listening to the dry branches snap beneath her heels, the thud of her pack against her shoulders.
Her breath steamed into the air, bats flitted like dark hands, and her shoes clicked against the pebbles of a streambed. She followed the stream, having no more energy to climb. Everything was still except for the water trickling over and around a trail of stones. Maybe she had been on a long trip. Her legs felt that way, and that’s what she would say if she met anyone who didn’t want to rape or kill her but just wanted a conv
ersation. She stopped walking and held her hand out in the air. She felt the train at the edge of town, pushing through the woods along its cleared path.
The ground flattened and the stream submerged in the soft earth. Dead, dried out pines sent her around to the right where she had to push forward through a tangle of bushes to reach a clearing. The heat of the afternoon sun collected here, thickening the damp air. Fallen branches hung above her in the branches of other trees, several of which stood only by leaning against their living neighbors.
There was no easy way forward through the tangles, but she wanted to see the lake once more before she reached the train and left forever. She closed her eyes and saw what she would see when she reached the lake: flashing lights and trucks, the people of her town gathered down by the water’s edge. Her mother would run back and forth in front of the house yelling her name while her brothers checked the beach and still others, assuming the worst, took to boats with the same grappling hooks they had used to drag for Franklin. They would comb the bottom for her body but never find it.
The sweat rolled down her face. She could see Franklin’s face, ruddy and unshaven, his jaw hanging open as he skated over the smooth ice. He was there, and then he wasn’t. It seemed that it had all started with her, as if the earth had opened beneath Franklin in response to her own indifference.
She reached the lake’s edge and looked across the flat water and saw her house and the pebbled shore of the town landing. They reminded her of nothing she had known. The tiny figures moving lazily along the shore might be her brothers, but she couldn’t tell. Cars passed along the shore road. One parked at the landing, and someone got out. It seemed like a place anyone might live, not the place where she had lived, and there were no signs of a search for her.
Of course they knew. It was impossible not to know in their house, in their town, when someone was missing, even for a day. They knew, they just weren’t doing anything about it. Maybe she had already been explained away.
None of the people of her town or her family were who they thought they were. Even if she, Katie, vanished under the surface, her mother and all the rest would cry for a while and mope, especially walking downtown, but in the end they would feel a secret relief that it wasn’t them. If she went back, she was not going to say anything about it, not for the rest of her life.
Tonight the dinner table would be full except for her place. Twenty years from now she would return, come up to her mother while she hung clothes on the line in back of the house, and rest a hand on her back. Her mother would have gray hair and dim eyes and thin hands like Katie’s grandmother’s. But there would be nothing to say when she returned, and she would return right now; she had to—she was from here. The images of all that she had seen would be erased when she was buried in the plot behind the Methodist church on the hill above the lake.
She followed the shore and arrived in less than an hour to stand at the edge of the woods by the McKinley’s field looking across the rock beach near her house. Dennis stood by the water kicking at something with the toe of his boot. He was dressed in his work clothes and had probably just finished working for his father. Maybe he thought she would never come home, that she had drowned, and this was all he could think to do. To see that nothing would change if she died was to know that she had never lived. She wanted to call out to him, to hear his voice return, but something in her resisted and watched for him to raise his chin so she could see her absence on his face. A wave of heat passed up her body and washed through her eyes as she waited for him to realize she was there. He turned around and looked up, as if at a mountain peak or a descending plane, but there was nothing above except a line of high white clouds pulling up over the valley like a cold sheet.
WHY THE DEVIL CHOSE NEW ENGLAND FOR HIS WORK
At the far end of the pond a beaver slapped its tail. Andrew had seen it there earlier in the summer, its brown head cutting across the glassy surface. The McNeils, alone on the other side of the beach with their two young kids, stood up and shielded their eyes to see, but Andrew’s mother didn’t stir from where she lay on the towel with her chin raised and her palms open to the sky.
Out on the float in the middle of the pond a kid in denim shorts, Andrew’s age or maybe older, walked to the edge of the diving board and bounced lightly with his toes curling off the edge and his arms hanging loosely at his sides. Andrew hadn’t seen him either walking down the beach or swimming. The kid stared at something in the water as he bounced, higher each time, and Andrew waited for him to dive off, but he didn’t. He stopped bouncing, stood still for a moment on the end of the board, and finally backed up. A gust shivered across the surface of the water, which caught the angle of the light, and Andrew’s eyes stung from the glare and he had to look away. There was a splash, and when he looked again the float was empty. The kid appeared on the beach with his black hair dangling over his nose and his pale tight shoulders knotted like roots. He held a turtle in his hands.
The kid wandered around a bend in the shoreline, and Andrew followed, walking along the beach. The kid stood in a small cove where the sand turned to mud. Andrew stopped twenty feet away and watched the turtle’s head stretch across the mud, mouth gaping.
“Hey,” the kid said, and Andrew nodded. The whistle of the Boston-Maine lowed from the edge of town. “I know who you are,” the kid said, half under his breath, as if talking to himself. “I heard about your sister drowning a couple months back.”
“How’d you know about that?” Andrew said.
“I’ve been living over in Monmouth with my grandma, but I’m from here. I just moved back. You know my little sister Tiny Small?”
Andrew said he did.
“Everybody does,” the kid said and stood up, holding a stone between his fingers. Andrew was sure he would aim at the turtle, which slowly pushed its way toward the water, but he just held the stone in the air and then rolled it into his palm.
“Andrew!” His mother called from around the corner, and after a second she called again. The sound of her voice slid across the water and disappeared.
“That’s you, right?” the kid said. He knelt down, picked the turtle up, and rested it on the surface of the pond. The shell floated for a moment and sank.
Andrew’s mother called again and again, but he didn’t move until he could hear something in the timber of her voice that he had heard the last time she had yelled his sister’s name.
“I have to go now,” Andrew said, and the kid nodded.
Today was Old Vaughn Day, and the town, founded just after the Revolution, was celebrating its two hundredth anniversary this July with the Whatever Race down the river and a parade on Water Street. Andrew’s father was in the lawn mower brigade, a group of guys from the Vaughn softball team who dressed up every year to push lawn mowers down Water Street. From the kitchen window, Andrew could see the last few rafts of the race struggling downriver, manned by the new friends his father had made since Stephanie’s death: women in braids and flowered skirts, men with long hair. Andrew agreed with his mother that they smelled, and not just of sweat. Drugs, hemp, compost. In the last five years, they had come from all over and moved to the woods on the edge of town. Rubber booters, people called them, because they went around in rubber boots even when it wasn’t raining. They made their own wine, and some of them had pottery for sale at Boyton’s.
No one, not even his parents, had mentioned his sister Stephanie in over a month, even though she had only died in March. Andrew stood in the kitchen and tried to remember the last thing Stephanie had said, but he could only picture her blank face as she sat at the table eating dinner the night it happened. She had pushed her fish away half-eaten.
He moved from one window to the next, looking at the river from different angles. Out in the current a giant beer can with a man on top, drinking a beer, drifted, trailing a Volkswagen bus on pontoons. A group of bearded men in a canoe decorated as a banana latched on to one of the log breaks built in the middle of the chan
nel.
Upstairs, Andrew asked his mother if she was going down to see the parade. She lifted her arm from in front of her face and let it fall off the side of the bed.
“Andrew, listen to me for a minute,” she said. “I don’t want you hanging around that kid from the pond. He’s one of the Smalls. All right?” Andrew nodded and she turned away from him onto her side. “Now, go on down to the parade. I’ll be along in a while.” She stretched her toes. He knew she wouldn’t go. When she wasn’t at work now, she spent most of her time napping.
The door to Stephanie’s bedroom had been closed since the day of the funeral, and he was afraid to open it. The morning before she died, he had walked right in and stood above where she sat with her legs splayed, flipping through a stack of records. The way she paused to consider each one, she didn’t seem to be looking for any particular album.
In the middle of her second year at the University of Southern Maine, where she had been studying physical therapy, Stephanie had taken a bus to Augusta and called from the station. Andrew had answered the phone, but without saying hello she asked for their mother, who stood a few feet away at the kitchen counter correcting student spelling tests. At dinner she didn’t explain why she was home. She talked about the guy she had sat next to on the bus, and asked her parents about people they all knew in Vaughn. Afterward, Andrew heard Stephanie and their mother whispering in the laundry room. For a brief second as he crossed the kitchen to the TV room, he caught sight of Stephanie’s face, her eyes closed and mouth slightly open as she leaned on the dryer. Her hair was tangled, and there were dark circles under her eyes. Something had happened to her down in Portland; she wasn’t the same. Their mother, who usually chattered away when Stephanie came back from school, cinched her mouth, as if afraid something ugly would slip out.
After she came home, Stephanie wouldn’t see any of her old friends. Andrew knocked several times on her door (sometimes when she was home they talked for hours into the night), but she either pretended not to be there, or told him harshly to leave her alone. At dinner every evening, no one talked. Their father asked her questions about classes, but she just gave one-word answers.