Somehow, I know that Tom would bend physics just to have me in that exact scene. But that isn't what I want right now, much as the thought warms me. What I need right now is this view of the lake, so dark at dusk, no semblance of joy or red sunset upon its surface. This is a bottomless place, one that creeps into dreams and underneath eyelids and fills even the most stoic boy's heart with terror. I'd hadn't lied when I said I went fishing, but the tied boat nudging and bumping the side of the dock had been out of use for more than a mere ten years. I'd never used it, I'd never sunk a rod into these ugly, black waters. I'd journeyed to a pond on the other side of the house and farther away from the lake and its black nightmare promise. "A girl drowned here once," I say, feeling Tom out about his thoughts on the lake.
He shudders and that satisfies me.
*** The evening is uneventful, save for Tom's exclamations on how run down my Aunt's home is, and how can we possibly live in such a shack for the entire summer? I sigh, Tom's overly gregarious exaggerations are getting on my nerves, and this is not how I want this to be. My Aunt's home used to be immaculate, but one can't expect thirty years of human existence to be cleaned up with one wipe of Pine Sol. Tom was used to things being new and shining, his parents' home is a sprawling mansion that was constantly rejuvenated with new construction projects every fall. He's used to perfect, unchipped drywall, and corners and nooks completely free of any semblance of dirt. As an adult he prefers condominiums to houses and the one we share back in the city has every stamp of his personality upon it. Brash, bold iron sculptures leading the way into the foyer. A huge painting that looks as though the artist's paints had puked on it hangs there. He did his best, poor Tom, and yes poor Tom, for while he is rich in stocks and bonds wealth, he is poverty stricken in taste.
He pokes around my Aunt's small cottage, picking up pieces of ancient bric a brac, pretending to know its appraised worth.
"I don't know why we have to spend the entire summer," he whines. I point to the one extravagance my Aunt had allowed herself: the very large television and its controller shaped, oddly enough, like a phaser rifle. I hand it to him as a peace offering, and the gesture works. Tom eagerly sits beside me on the couch, unsettling the multicolored quilt that lies overtop it in his haste.
"Yes! The game's on!" He gives me a leering grin as we sit on the couch, the sounds of hockey filling the room. His arm entwines around my waist, to become more of an insistent pawing. "I guess it would be stupid of me to ask if there's a place to order pizza?" he says.
"Yes, it would," I answer. I look over his shoulder at the tiny kitchen. "We should bring the food in. We have the ingredients for spaghetti." "I'd rather pizza," Tom pouts. His attention is driven away from the game and he is now seriously considering the inside of my thigh. I can't say the attention is unwanted, but it feels eerie to have this happening here, in my Aunt's house.
If I lean my head in just the right direction I can see through the small side window, the houses across the lake, the one in specific detail that I had gotten to know best of all. The house belonging to Gerald.
I shudder and pull away from Tom's touch. Everything suddenly feels captured in fingers of ice. Small, pained, digits clutch at my heart. I get up.
"I'll get started on dinner," I say.
*** Tom is persistent when he's worried, it is one of the main reasons why I love him. As we lie breathing against one another, our nude bodies blanketed in darkness, it is Tom who whispers it into my ear, kissing me softly, his hands petting my hair.
"What's wrong?" he says. He props himself on his elbow and stares down at me, limpid blue eyes dreamily taking me in as if I was one of his favorite objects d'art. Knowing his lack of taste, I'm not sure if I should be flattered or not. He clasps his hand in mine and kisses it, the softness of his lips making me remember just what we'd done earlier, on this tiny, narrow bed. I wouldn't dream of even looking in my Aunt's room, where a much more comfortable double bed is neatly made and waiting for its usual occupant. It's so full of her dainty country flowers and potpourri, all juxtaposed with her more rustic fare, like her hacksaw for chopping the firewood into smaller chunks, and her various scattered debris of a woman in the bush. Safety pins are in a pile on the dresser, there's a crack in the antique mirror. There are stacks of Readers’ Digest and The Farmers’ Almanac at her beside table, along with a mug that said 'Instate Insurance'. She is still there, in that room, a physical entity that wasn't about to leave. I'd closed the creaking door and guided a very tired Tom to my old bed instead.
"You said you wanted to come here, more than anything. Father wasn't too pleased to see me taking the time off from the company to go 'gallivanting' as he puts it. I think he believes I'm off to Greece to hang out at some sex beach or something, that's the kind of thing he thinks I'm about, the stupid jackass." My knuckles are tenderly kissed. "We don't have to stay here, you know. You've paid your respects to your Aunt at the funeral, I don't know why you think you have to overcompensate like this."
"That's not it," I reply.
"Then what?"
Unbidden, a flash of memory falls over me in that dark room.
Black eyes. A black lake. Icy fingers stabbing the inside of my heart.
I put my arms around Tom, in a gesture supposedly about calming his worries, but more about giving myself some comfort.
"It's nothing," I insist.
***
I'm alive, it seems, but I'm watching death. It creeps around me in black water, icily holding itself against my heart, her long black hair curling around my neck, drawing me under, my lungs so full and compact from lack of oxygen I'm a water's breath away from drowning. I try to pry her fingers from my heart, and even in the water I can hear the bones invading my lungs snap like twigs.
I wake. I'm dripping in a thin sheen of sweat, not at all sure I want to fall back onto those covers again. Tom is softly snoring beside me, most of his limbs fallen off of the small bed and onto the floor. I disentangle myself from his embrace, and make my way shakily to the open suitcase on the floor, where I tug out a pair of pajama bottoms. In the dark I can't tell if they are Tom's or mine. By the time I leave the room and close the door behind me, I realize they are too large for me and they have to be Tom's.
I sigh, chasing fear away with the steady intake of my breath, hoping this will ease the slowing down of my hammering heart. The dream was one that has attacked me before, but with its ally, that huge, cold lake behind me, I am at its mercy.
The cabin is cheerless, covered in shadows of blue and black, a bruised setting as I wade my way through it. I dare to open the side door leading to the pantry, a small, rarely used room for holding my Aunt's saws and duck feed. I see it. It sits with haunted purpose in the far corner of the pantry, partially hidden by the large sacks of gravel my aunt used to line her flowerbeds with.
The tiny school desk and the ancient typewriter on top of it.
I approach it, the dark blues and blacks of the shadows clinging to me. There it is, that small desk with the black typewriter, so old it would have been out of date in the thirties. I swallow back bile, half expecting to see a blank piece of paper in its roll, but thankfully it's empty. I reach out, as though to touch it, only to cringe my attempt away.
What had my Aunt been thinking, I wonder, to keep this reminder for so long? It seems oddly cruel, in a way, for hadn't she dashed every dream I had created upon the paper I had purchased with my errand money? Hadn't she told me it was foolish and a waste of time to put my fingers on those keys and coax words onto perfectly good paper? She'd blamed the slip in my grades on my inattention to reality and had dutifully locked my fantasies and creations away. I had only my mind to work with then, and in many ways this might have been worse.
The desk drawer is barely visible in the dark, but I know it's there. I know the red of the mahogany this ancient typewriter sits on; I know every knotted grain of its surface, every notch in its spindly legs. The chair, with its one rung in the back missing, is als
o exactly as I left it; my name etched into the side of the seat with a key..."Mickey". I know there is a knob on that desk drawer that is a lighter shade than the rest of the wood, I know how round and smooth it feels against my palm. I know that if I seek it out and open that drawer, I'll have Pandora's wide mouth gobbling after me, and all the world would flood in black and blue darkness forever.
I open the drawer. Crisp, white pages greet me. For a second, I feel relief, until I dare to take the pages out and thumb through them, their edges tinged yellow. I scan through blank pages until a set of fully typed ones shout out at me with such force they might have slapped me.
These pages aren't harmless. I had counted on my Aunt to destroy them, but she had merely placed my dreaming into this room to gather dust and be forgotten. She hadn't found this, my last creation, the one I only now remember having hidden away beneath the stack of blank paper, hoping my secret would remain. It seems I had succeeded in this, since she had never bothered to take the pages from the drawer.
A grave oversight on her part. My hands are shaking, I can't let go of the pages.
I want to call for Tom, to beg him for help, but I have no voice left.
There is only the swirl of words, pale and yellow on a typed page, one in particular winding its way over and over to my terrified eyes.
Annabelle.
*** Breakfast arrives by my early waking. Tom blearily walks out of the bedroom and instantly brightens at the scent of frying bacon, his hands eagerly rubbing together as he inspects my cooking at the squat, vintage fifties stove. His eyes rove over the oddly placed dials and switches on its front panel instead of on another rectangle on the back, as is common in modern stoves. The surface of it is inordinately large, too, with bloated burners that would never burn out, and rounded steel edges shellacked in a hospital aqua coating that had never chipped in all the many years my Aunt had used it. He opens the door of the oven and frowns. "It looks like such a big old clunker, but the inside oven is so small."
I shrug over my toast. "That's the way they made them back then." He closes it carefully. "I guess I should be happy she didn't use a coal stove." He stretches and yawns, ending the action with a quick scratch at his belly. "So, what is the adventure for today?" He looks over his shoulder as he is getting his bacon, placing the strips on a white plate. "Swimming?"
I try not to shudder. "No," I say and hope he doesn't detect any of the latent fear in my voice. "Fishing."
Tom's mouth instantly breaks into a wide, pleased grin. "Alright! We can use that boat..." "No." I point somewhere vaguely northeast with the corner of my toast. "There's a pond with lots of fish not far from here, it's where I usually went."
"But..." Tom is confused. He picks up a piece of bacon and begins chewing it. "There's a huge lake right behind us, you can't tell me it isn't better there."
"There's no fish in it," I assure him.
It might have even been true.
*** We are getting dressed when Tom finds them, the papers I thought I had so carefully stashed away in the side table. He thumbs through the pages, not looking at me as he does so. I sit on the edge of the bed, wondering why I hadn't just destroyed them. Or maybe I had and, like the ghosts those pages were, they kept coming back, rearranging their molecular structure until they were whole again. So much of who and what I am had been formed by their existence, they were like proof of my life.
"Mickey," he says as he reads them over. "Is this something you wrote?" He doesn't bother waiting for me to give any explanation. "This is pretty good." He inspects the yellowed edges of the papers. "You wrote this when you were a kid?"
I nod, and aim to take the papers from his grasp, but Tom is obstinate in his perusal. "This isn't bad at all, you should show it to your editor." I feel something cold wedge itself in my throat. So innocently those words had fallen from Tom's lips, in a gesture of kindness and pride for his lover, for me, and yet I take threat in the promise. I seize the papers from him and shove them in the side table drawer, fully ready to burn them later if that's how it has to be. "It was a long time ago, " I try to keep the panic out of my voice. "I don't think it's that good, I'm much better at the craft now."
Tom opens his mouth, ready to argue, but the looming thought of fishing and of enjoying the time we were going to spend in this isolated spot seems to wear on him more. He lets the subject drop and grabs the waiting fishing pole lying across a chair in the corner of the room. "I hope there's trout." He flashes me a smile. "You can gut it and scale it and all of that, hillbilly."
I smack him playfully on the back of the head. I pretend cheerfulness though I don't feel it. "Jackass. I'll show you how to do it." "No way," Tom says, ever savvy. "You'll only get me to do it all the time." He pokes at the center of my chest with the pole; the metal circle at its tip slightly scratches my skin. It leaves a circular imprint at the region of my heart, the tiny piece of cold metal amplified in my memory. I swallow deeply and grab a T-shirt out of the open suitcase in a vain attempt to erase its feeling.
"Come on," he taps at the fishing pole with his palm, "let's go get lunch!"
I am more pessimistic. "We might not catch anything." I twine my arm around his waist and steal a kiss from smiling lips. "Then again, maybe we will." We get our gear and leave the cabin behind. I won't look back at its foreboding presence, at the way those papers still linger within it, at the way the lake further behind it is slowly lapping in soft currents into the morning. A black lake that never lets in sunlight, not even on a cheerful day like today. I want to be far away from it all, just for a little while, to a place that was welcoming, warm and felt so much like Tom's chest when I lean against it. I want, no, I need strength and comfort for the days and weeks that are to come.
Leaves fall before my feet, mottled, brown, and crisp with death. I crush them with my steps.
2. My personality is not harsh, but I feel its prickles creeping into my voice as Tom exclaims over how small the pond is, his hopes dashed as he looks out onto the pile of mud that once held water. It is a murky, foul smelling place, and while part of me understands his disgust, another thinks of how childish he is being. This was my refuge from all worries and harm in the tiny world I lived in for ten years. Here, I was free to dream and think and create my own place within the universe, and not be under the thumb of a totalitarian Aunt and her hatred of imagination.
"I don't know how we'll catch anything in this ugly little pool," Tom mutters again, and I want to hit him. He is exaggerating. The pond, yes, had shrunken a little since I was a child, but massive clumps of foliage had replaced the water, its stagnant pools pungent, but still teeming with life. Tom slaps his neck, the sound echoing across the trees on the other side.
"Look." I point into a pile of reeds, "Frogs." Two of them, the last remainders of the season, lazily sit amongst the reeds, not moving as Tom and I approach closer. The colder weather was making them sluggish, and if I want to I can easily capture one or both and take them home. But their quiet reflection belongs here, not in a jar in the house. A round eye swivels at me and a sound erupts from the tiny creature, not unlike a rubber band being snapped. They both jump into the water, my shadow far too conspicuous for their liking.
Tom, for all his complaints, has already set up his fishing pole and tosses in the first line. His new jeans have splotches of mud on the knees, something he'll bemoan when we get back to the small house. Otherwise, he is resigned to being here and is now making the most of it. He is such a city dweller, my Tom, and I can't help but feel a little sorry for the way I have thrust him into a place he doesn't belong. I don't know why it felt so important for me to bring him here in the first place, maybe it was to work some kind of exorcism or personal peace. Neither are being granted. I had made a mistake.
"I'm sorry, Tom," I blurt out. "I know you didn't really want to come here."
I had meant 'here' to mean the entire trip, but Tom took the shorter view. "Oh, the pond's not that bad, I guess. You came here a lot as a ki
d?"
"Yeah." "It's a nice peaceful little spot," he observes.
"Yeah, it is." We watch the surface of the water for a while, minnows nipping at Tom's line. There was trout in here, once, but the small rivulet that had let fresh water into the pond had dried up and now the pond was more stagnant. It was unlikely anything other than insects or reptiles lived here now.
As if making a liar of me, Tom's line pulls taught. He eagerly tugs on it, bringing in his catch, a grey head poking out of the surface of the water. He pulls on the line and nearly falls into the water himself as he brings the fish to shore. It is huge and bloated, I see with some surprise. An ancient catfish drawn up from the pond's center.
"Holy shit, look at this ugly thing!" And being a huge catfish, it definitely was. Tom whistles while it flops around on shore, not at all confident with picking it up with his bare hands. He points at its massive 'whiskers' and its equally large mouth that gaped at him.
"We can have it for lunch," I offer, but Tom is feeling differently.
"Nah, he has to be an old thing, to get this big, right?"
I nod. He unhooks the barb out of the fish's mouth, an action that makes him grimace and look as though he is about to be sick. He gestures to me, "Well, don't just sit there, throw the ol' bastard back in and let him die of old age!"
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