I looked up and caught a quick motion in the moonlight, then scanned the field behind the library for its source. It took me a moment to untangle the silhouette from the picnic table, but finally I saw her. And as I stared across the distance between us, I was certain Aida saw me too.
22
Colt’s Point
I was awake, but the music sounded like it came from a dream. It was just after dawn. I came out of Loon’s Nest and had taken a few steps toward the campground when I realized the melody was coming from the other direction. I turned and took the path to the rocky trail in the woods that skirted the pond.
I floated down the trail, my steps buoyed by the sweet strains of a violin. The piece was heartbreakingly beautiful. As I walked, I heard the melody repeat a couple of times before growing more animated. I came out of the woods just as the music reached its climax.
Aida stood in profile before the pond. She wore shorts and a T-shirt, but her bearing was regal. One foot was planted higher than the other, her head tipped to cradle the violin in the crook of her neck. Thick waves of auburn hair spilled across her shoulders. Her arms circled the instrument, the bow swaying across its strings in long and even sweeps. I think she heard me approach, but she didn’t look up. Her eyes were closed under a brow creased by passion for the music that she played. There was a short cadenza before the melody ended with the softest touch of harmonics. Aida waited until the last high, sweet note faded into the early morning silence. Then she spoke, her eyes trained on the shore.
“It’s the Thaïs Meditation,” she said.
It took me a moment to find my voice. Words seemed too crude a tool to describe what I’d heard.
“Beautiful,” I said simply. “I had no idea you played.”
She turned to me then, picking her way down the rocks to stand beside me.
“Since I was five.”
“It sounded flawless.”
“Yeah, well, you know what Gram says—”
“Practice makes perfect,” we recited in unison, then laughed.
“Where does that music come from?”
“Jules Massenet. It’s part of an opera he wrote. Thaïs was a beautiful Egyptian courtesan devoted to the goddess Venus. The story is about a monk who tries to convert her to Christianity. The meditation comes just after he tries to persuade her to change her ways.”
“Powerful theme.”
“Yeah, but with a twist. In the end it turns out that Thaïs is really the one living a life in harmony with her God. The monk was just a horny old man driven by lust, not love.” Aida tucked her violin into its case and looked at me with a sad smile. “Now does that pair sound like anyone we know?”
I answered only with a glance, then led her up the rocks to the trail, but when Aida turned toward camp, I touched her arm.
“You up for a hike?” I asked.
***
It was a short one. Aida flipped the straps of her violin case over her shoulders and wore it like a backpack for our walk. In less than a mile, the pond trail led to the short peninsula ending at Colt’s Point. The morning was heating up quickly. When we reached our destination, I bent down and cupped a handful of water from the pond to wash the sweat from my brow. I sat on the bank beside Aida as we took in the view of the campground. The cabins hugged the arc of the pond’s northwestern shore. Doubletop rose from the forest behind them—a bright teal triangle hovering above the blue pines still shadowed below.
“I come out here pretty often,” I said. “I can usually sneak away for an hour, even on a busy day, to get a look at things from another angle. Sometimes it’s the best way to see what’s really going on.”
The campground was quiet. It was a Monday morning late in the season, just three weeks before the park would close. I looked at the canoes at the landing. They were all there, although I was disappointed to see that one had been left unracked again.
Aida reached forward and spread her fingers over the water, lowering their tips till they just made contact with the pond. She raised and lowered them a few times, touching the water, as if testing the tension on its surface to see how much weight it could hold.
“Should I tell her?” she asked, turning to me for an answer.
I found a small stone, picked it up, and skipped it across the pond. “I can’t answer that for you, Aida.”
She watched the ripples from my rock die, then asked another question.
“Should you tell her?” This time, I left the question burning in the light of the new day.
I pointed to the small rise of land behind us. “See that high ground, there?” I asked. “Over a hundred years ago, that was one of the grandest camps the North Woods has ever seen.” She turned to follow my finger.
“Colt’s Point was named for the nephew of the inventor of the Colt revolver. The camp he built here in the late 1800s drew guests from all over. One was Ethel Barrymore, a famous Broadway actress. She used to play the camp’s Steinway piano. There was also a pool table and two bowling alleys, with pin boys who’d run down and set the pins for the guests every time they knocked them over.”
“Here?” asked Aida, scanning the tangle of brush and piney woods behind us.
“Yep. One winter, years later, they moved some of the camp’s buildings across the frozen pond and used them for the Kidney Pond camps on the other side. Some of the boards were built into dining tables, and you could find the old bowling balls resting among the bookshelves they built.” I turned back to watch her search the woods behind me, as if waiting for the ghosts of those days to emerge from the shadows between the pines.
“The point is, Aida,” I said, “things change. As bad as things may seem right now, they won’t stay that way. Usually, when things look the worst, that’s the time closest to a change.”
“Did your parents fight?” she asked. The question caught me off guard.
“No,” I said immediately. But in the next instant came the memories that made that statement a lie.
“Except after we lost Jordan . . . ,” I began again slowly.
“What about?” Aida asked.
“Small stuff. Stupid stuff. Usually a disagreement about something my father had scheduled. He was always planning things for us to do: somewhere to go, trying to get us to feel like a family again.” I turned to Aida as I continued. “And I never understood why my mother didn’t jump in and go along for the ride. She always loved the way my father arranged things for us before. But after Jordan died, it seemed like she didn’t believe my father knew what was best for us. She just didn’t believe him, or maybe, in him anymore.”
“So things changed,” Aida said softly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Things changed.”
23
Ruby Eye
Aida reached down and began untying her sneakers. “I don’t care what Mom says,” she said, standing up. “I’m going in.” She waded into the water in her shorts and T-shirt, then turned back to me. “You coming?”
When I unlaced my boots and looked up, she was smiling. She let out a whoop and dove in. I threw my T-shirt on the bank and did the same.
The water was bracing, but I’d felt colder. Aida popped up with a shriek and started swimming from shore. I flipped onto my back to follow her, vigorously scissoring my arms and legs to warm my body. She kept swimming, and I followed the sound of her splashing laughter farther into the pond.
“The loons!” she shouted. I turned over and spotted the pair I’d seen patrolling the pond all summer, studying us as they drifted by.
“Hoo-woooo-hoo!” Aida called to them. I turned from the loons to look back at Aida as I treaded water beside her. The sight of her sunlit face bobbing over the silver ripples around us was such a shock that my arms and legs froze. I sank, my face slipping under the surface before I started kicking again.
I bobbed there in place, puzzled and amazed as Aida laughed and called again to the loons. How could I not have seen it before? Why had it taken so long for the tugs of recognition t
hat pulled at me so often in my niece’s presence to finally surface? Then I got it: it was her hair.
Aida’s bushy auburn locks were her most striking feature, an aura of fiery filaments that seemed to vibrate with her passion and anger. But there, in the water, with that fire doused and her hair collapsed into the dark helmet framing the soft oval of her face, the resemblance to Jordan was overpowering. In the water, it was my sister’s face I saw calling to the loons—just the way she used to, a lifetime ago.
“You okay?” Aida laughed, studying my expression as she treaded water next to me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
***
We stood on the bank together a few minutes later. Aida twisted the hem of her T-shirt to wring it out, then squeegeed her palms against her cotton shorts.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said. “Not yet.”
“Your parents might worry.”
She thought for a moment before she replied.
“The trail goes all the way around the pond, right?”
I nodded.
“Could you tell them I took it? Would you mind if I hiked the rest of the way around and met you back at camp?”
“Only if you have your inhaler with you.” Her face fell, then brightened. She hurried over to the violin case and opened it on the grass, then lifted the velvet-covered lid of a small compartment inside.
“Yes!” She reached in and turned, smiling, to hold the inhaler in triumph above her head.
“Looks like you’ve started listening to your father’s advice.”
She tucked the inhaler in her pocket and replied, “Actually, he put it there. He started doing that after the hospital—stashing them everywhere, in my backpack, my jackets, here . . .”
“Whatever else is happening, it doesn’t change the fact that he loves you, Aida.” She looked at the ground as she slipped into her sandals.
“Shall I take your violin?”
“That’d be great,” she said, her smile returning. Before I knew it, she rushed over and hugged me, giving me the same strong embrace and quick release her mother had given me when I’d first stood at their front door.
“Thanks—” she said, freezing there for an instant before waving and taking off down the trail. I heard her hesitation—the small space after the word that should have been filled by my name. Though she hadn’t adopted the term Aaron used the day before, I was happy with the awkward silence that might have stood for “Uncle.”
I sat on the bank thinking about my sister. I couldn’t say I believed in reincarnation; I didn’t think it was Jordan’s repurposed soul I saw animating my niece’s face. But the mystery of my sister’s death—of death itself—came alive in those waters that morning, a fuzzy revelation on the edge of my awareness that skirted the periphery of my mind every time I tried to pin it down.
I refused to surrender that enigma to Kim’s God, to deem the question his provenance to puzzle alone. Science didn’t get me much farther. It all seemed bigger than some biological burst. The connection I felt had to be more than a mere patch of proteins lodged amid a nest of neurons within the depths of my brain, more than the cluster of chemicals assigned to my sister’s memory that fired alive when the fuse between my optic nerve and that forgotten cache ignited in the moment I saw Aida in the pond. Even when I went to the edge of science and took the beautiful quantum leap Aaron had described the day before, I could not embrace Jordan’s manifestation in the potential worlds he described.
But though I could trace none of the paths that pointed to my sister to any sort of satisfying conclusion about her location or her fate, I did know one thing as I sat by the bank of the pond that had claimed her: since the day of her death, I’d never felt closer to Jordan.
I started to rise but paused when one of the loons drifted right in front of me. She glided to a stop, floating still in the water, eyeing me carefully with her single, shining ruby eye. I knew about that color—how the flush of red pigment filtered the light to grant her the underwater sight that other creatures lacked. It was the gift that let her dive below the surface to witness the myriad mysteries swirling within the depths below.
24
Off Duty
I walked out of the woods and gave my family a wave. Mara, Aaron, and Robert were eating at the picnic table in the field. There was a couple beside them and a pair of kids flinging horseshoes in the pit by the edge of the woods. I turned toward the cabin to put Aida’s violin inside.
Before I reached it, Kim came out, bumping the door open with a hip. I’d given her a pair of trekking poles to use as impromptu crutches while her ankle healed, and she planted one before looking up. Her mouth was crimped in a tight smile, but when she saw the violin case in my hand, it vanished.
“Where’s Aida?”
“She’s fine, she—”
“Why are you wet?” she asked, her voice rising.
“Kim, it’s okay. Aida’s fine—”
“Where is she?” I saw the stiff profiles of a couple of campers pass us, their eyes trained on the path in front of them.
“Calm down!” I said, surprising both of us with my tone. She froze.
“We hiked over to Colt’s Point and took a swim. She’s hiking the trail around the pond. She’ll be back in an hour.”
“Did she have her inhaler with her?”
“Yes. It was the first thing I asked her.”
“You know an asthma attack could kill her, right?”
“Did you hear what I just said? She’s got her meds. And it’s a flat walk, Kim; it’s not that far.”
Her mouth softened, but her eyes stayed hard.
“You could have gone with her. You should have gone with her.”
“I came back to tell you where she was so you wouldn’t worry.”
“Well I am worried! I wake up, she’s gone, you’re gone. No one knows where you are. And last night you bring Aaron home way after dark.” Her eyes traveled down my wet body. “Then this morning you take Aida swimming when she knows—when you know—I don’t want her in that pond.”
“Kim, nothing bad is going to happen.”
“How can you say that? There have been forty-five deaths in this park. I looked it up online. This place is dangerous, especially for a child who’s never been here before. Did you know Jordan wasn’t the first person to drown in this pond? And another did the same right where you and Aaron were yesterday, at those falls. He told me about the little climb you took down to the river and back too. Were you trying to kill him?” She shook her head. “You’re the big brother, Paul; you’re supposed to look out for people.”
I unclenched my jaw so I could get the words out. “Sometimes the best way to help someone is to let him help himself.”
I don’t think she heard me. Her eyes left my face to settle on the ranger cap on my head. A second later her finger rose to point at it. “Preserve and Protect,” she said, reading the inscription aloud. “Isn’t that your job here? Well, you’re doing a pretty shitty job of protecting my kids.”
“I’m off duty!” I shot back, taking the hat from my head. I flipped my wrist and sent it sailing past the cabin as I continued, “And your kids are just fine. You’re the one not doing her job. They’re teenagers, Kim, not babies. They’ll never make it as adults if you keep treating them that way. Where’s this faith I hear you talk so much about? That light and love you place so much trust in? Maybe God’s off duty too—once you step away from the pulpit.” She flinched at my words. I should have shut up when I saw that, but I kept right on rolling.
“You use him when it’s convenient—like explaining why our sister drowned in a pond. He’s a good guy to turn to for answers about the past, but you don’t quite trust him to take care of the future.”
Kim’s eyes began to fill. She shuffled in the doorway, her eyes creasing in a wince when her bad foot hit the ground. I stepped forward to help her, but she spun around and hobbled back into the cabin. I closed the door and turned away.
When I risked a glance around, I saw the figures in the field frozen in place. Even the two kids playing horseshoes had stopped their game and stood like statues. Every pair of eyes was staring straight at me.
25
Quiet Hours
I was still looking at the ground as I made my way across the field, so I saw Tyler’s boots before the rest of him. I looked up to see him holding my ranger cap in his outstretched hand.
“Thanks,” I said, taking it.
“No problem.”
I started walking away. “Uh, Paul?”
I turned back. The worried look on his face made him look like he’d just been sent to the principal’s office.
“Yes?”
He looked past me to the field. The kids were playing horseshoes again. Robert and Mara were talking while Aaron ate his cereal, but there were still people looking curiously at the two of us.
“Let’s talk over here,” Tyler said, leading me toward his cabin. When we’d walked a dozen paces, he continued, his voice low.
“Jesus, Paul, I hate to say this, but there have been some complaints. About your family. There was an argument going on last night, way past quiet hours.”
I reached up, pinched my eyes, and gave my face a rough rub with my palm.
“Okay, Tyler,” I said. “I get it. I’ll try to keep them under control.”
“Thanks, Paul,” he said. “I knew you’d understand. Is there anything I can do?”
“Nope, I’m on it. I’ll make sure—”
“—But you’re never around!” The shout came from across the field.
I let out a soft “shit” and started walking briskly toward its source. Mara was looking up at Robert, her arms spread with her palms facing the sky. He was standing by the table, shaking his head. As I got closer, I saw that Aaron’s eyes were glued to the back of the cereal box. I was about to step between Mara and Robert, but when I heard Robert’s voice, it was calm and level, so I waited.
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