Quicksand Pond

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “It may be, but that is the plan. Julia asked and I agreed. She’s older now and needs space.”

  There was no dealing with him when he spoke that way. Next he instructed the girls to make the beds, in a tone so maddening to Jessie (whereas Julia went off like an angel to find the linen closet) that she sat on the stairs and screamed. Just screamed!

  “Jessie, come on. You’re too old for that.” Her father paused over her. “Jonathan needs you. He’ll feel safer if there’s someone in the room. You know how he wakes up at night in the dark.”

  “So you sleep with him!”

  “I may be working late. With the light on. I’m writing something.”

  “You’re always writing something.”

  “Well, now I may be writing something else. Did you know I’ve been here before?”

  “Where, this house?”

  “Not here. In town.”

  “You never told us.”

  “It was years ago. Now, if you’ll please help Julia with the beds, I’ll get Jonathan out from underfoot. We need groceries and supplies. I’ll take him with me to the store. You’ll be finished in no time, and then . . .” Jessie felt the weight of his considering eyes. “Then you’ll have an hour to yourself before dinner. Is that a pond through the reeds, possibly in need of exploration?” His hand brushed the top of her head.

  “How did you know it was there?”

  “I remember it. Quicksand Pond. I used to row around out there with a friend.”

  “Dad! You never said. Is that why we came here?”

  “Of course not.”

  When Jessie looked up, she saw that his attention had moved away. With compressed lips, he was gazing at Jonathan across the room. Something was about to happen. A storm was about to break.

  It came with a wail; Jonathan was in tears. He’d been listening to their conversation. Hearing that he was to be taken away, removed without consent like a small child, he’d decided to push back.

  “I’m not leaving,” he wept to his father. “I can make my own bed.”

  “Well, of course, by all means, stay if you must.”

  “I want to explore the pond with Jessie! I don’t want to go to the store.”

  “All right, but . . . I was thinking we might buy you a present, a little reward for being such a helpful fellow,” Jessie heard her father say with expert diplomacy as they walked downstairs.

  “I don’t want a present.”

  “Oh well, I guess not, then.”

  “Like what kind of present?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want? How about bug spray?”

  “Bug spray! Why do I want that? You want that.”

  “No, you want it,” Jessie heard her father say. “You want it to knock out and capture rare and possibly undocumented bugs to add to your famous collection.”

  “But I don’t have a famous collection.”

  “But you will, you will. After a few weeks in this place.”

  The screen door slammed.

  When they had driven off, Jessie made her bed with the sheets and blankets Julia found in a cupboard at the top of the stairs. Then she went to her father’s tiny room, where the bed looked too narrow for even a child. She was just tucking in the blanket when Julia’s voice came down the hall.

  “Are you done? I made Jonathan’s bed. If you want, you can move in with me.”

  “That’s all right.” The idea of rooming with Julia and all her fake niceness seemed far more unbearable.

  “I’m going to try walking to the beach,” Julia said. “Maybe we can get reception down there. Have you tried your cell?”

  “No.”

  “So get it and let’s go.”

  “No thanks. I’m staying here.”

  “Oh, come on. It’ll be fun. Don’t be a rat.”

  “I’m not a rat. I just don’t want to go.”

  “Why don’t you ever want to do anything anyone else wants to do?” Julia said. “You’re the most impossible person. Even Mother says so.”

  “Actually, I’m quite a nice person. She only said that because I don’t always do what she wants.”

  “Well, I’ll go by myself.”

  Julia marched down the stairs and went outside, letting the screen door slam like a rude word.

  “Tell Dad where I am so he doesn’t worry,” she called back with another maddening show of thoughtfulness.

  “Tell him yourself ! I won’t be here!” Jessie bellowed. She went down the hall to the room she and Jonathan would somehow occupy together and looked out the window.

  The pond was there, a shadowy map of shallows and depths. From this vantage its colors were darker, navy blue and maroon. The view was extensive and revealed new details: a tiny island out in the water shaped like a haystack; the roof of what looked to be an enormous house lurking behind bushes far up one shore. Directly below her the furry back of some mysterious creature slipped silently through the reeds.

  Jessie went downstairs and out the front door.

  Their cottage lay at the end of a long dirt road that wound uphill through overgrown pastures. Julia’s figure appeared at intervals moving up this track toward the main road. Jessie waited until her sister was out of sight before turning toward the pond. She followed her first path through the brush to the place on the bank.

  The strange platform was still there, floating quite close now. She had only to stretch out a foot to draw it in. With a wary toe she tested it. A moment later she stepped out on it, grasping a clump of cattails for balance.

  The wooden planks could not support her and sank under the water. Jessie leaped for dry land but too late. Her new leather sneakers were soaked and she was wet to her ankles.

  The minute she was off it, the platform sprang to the surface, as if teasing her to try again. She took off her sneakers and did. This time she stepped slowly, keeping her weight even, and was better supported. She steadied herself with the reeds and saw how she could propel the raft (for this is what it seemed to be) by grabbing the bushy stems and pulling herself between them.

  The pond surged warm and dark over her bare feet when she tipped to one side. But she was determined, and progressed away from the bank into deeper water. After several minutes the reeds came to an end and she could go no farther. She stood gazing out across the pond’s open surface. Behind her the place she’d set out from was lost in greenery.

  And I am lost too, Jessie thought. No one who hadn’t seen her go off would know she was here. For a long time she stood that way, content to be woven into the silver-green fabric of the pond.

  A cry echoed across the water. Or was it a laugh? Far up the shore a long-legged figure leaped away through the reeds. A marsh bird, she thought, though it looked almost human. Afterward silence spread around her, as if everything was pausing to listen. Then the murmuring symphony of aquatic noises began again: husky rattles, amphibious croaks, the drone of unseen insects. Underneath it all came a low, drumming thunder from the direction of the sand embankment at the pond’s end.

  That was the ocean. The great Atlantic, her father had called it. Beneath her feet the heavy wooden platform rose and fell on invisible currents. A hoarse cackle sounded overhead. She looked up to see three shiny black birds shoot past, their searchlight eyes scanning the shoreline ahead.

  By now Julia would be there, walking along the sand, waving her phone over her head, trying to locate a place where the signal kicked in. Julia was an important hub person in her group back home. She connected to a network of friends, and friends of friends, who stayed continuously in touch. Hour by hour Julia received news from these contacts and passed it along. Minute by minute she reported on her own life and was reported back to.

  Jessie had friends, but they would have been surprised to hear from her. She was always a little out of things at home, never the first person, or even the tenth, to know what was happening. Even now her phone was not in her pocket. It was back in the cottage in a duffel bag on the floor of her room.


  A raw sea wind cut through the reeds. The sun had dropped low on the horizon and threatened soon to slide out of sight. Night was on the march. Already the water around her was veiled in purple shadow. Jessie edged across the raft, grasped a clump of reeds, and began to pull herself toward shore.

  In the half-light the pond’s vegetation seemed to curl around her, snarling the raft in leafy clumps. She lost track of the route she’d taken to come out, and stopped to listen for the ocean. But the wind had risen, and the sound was drowned out by rattling cattails. A slow wave of fear broke through her, then a grim recognition of how ridiculous she was: to be caught in such a place, only yards from shore, when she was the one so determined to get away. She grasped a reedy clump and yanked herself onward.

  Dark had fallen when at last she found the bank. She barely recognized her landing place. When the raft hit shore, she leaped off, grabbed up her sneakers, and rushed for the house. With relief she saw that the car was there. The shoppers had returned. She heard pots banging inside the brightly lit kitchen and went in that way, by the back door. She intended to say nothing about where she’d been, but:

  “Look at Jessie!” Jonathan shrieked the instant she appeared. “Did you fall in, Jessie? I guess you fell in.”

  When she looked down, she saw that her legs were streaked with mud right up to the bottom of her shorts, and that her sneakers were too wet to look new ever again. The mark of the pond was most certainly on her.

  THREE

  Someone’s out on the pond,” Henrietta said from her command post at the bedroom window.

  “Well, imagine that! Come along, Miss Cutting; time to finish your milk.” Sally Parks from the HomeTouch Agency was quite up to dealing with wayward old ladies.

  “Someone on a raft,” Henrietta said, pushing the binoculars closer against her watery eyes. “I believe it is a child.”

  “And who else would it be? Who else but a child?”

  Sally had put a sleeping drug in the milk, as suggested by the doctor. She wanted Henrietta to hurry up and drink it and settle down for the night.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, you wouldn’t catch me out on a raft,” Sally said. “Not in a hundred years.”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t,” Henrietta replied. “You would have sunk it long before that.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “It takes lightness to ride a raft,” Henrietta said. She lowered the binoculars and glanced across at Sally’s meaty shape. “Lightness,” she repeated, “in both body and mind.”

  “Well, that’s a nice thing to say! Let’s have none of your insults now. Drink up the rest of your milk, dear. It’ll do you good.”

  “I don’t like milk,” Henrietta said, with her eyes screwed back to the binoculars. “I prefer cranberry juice.”

  “That surprises me,” Sally Parks countered ably. “Surprises me no end. It was just last night, I believe, that you preferred milk to cranberry juice. And I kindly went down and got it for you. Didn’t I do that?”

  “Did not,” said Henrietta.

  “Did so.”

  Henrietta swiveled her binoculars away from the raft, up toward the other end of the pond, where a flurry of movement had caught her eye.

  “There goes that wild pond girl running home,” she reported. “She’s late for dinner, I’d say.”

  “Hah, what dinner?” Sally said, glancing out. “She’s one of those Carrs at the end of the pond. The life they lead is a public shame. Come along now, Miss Cutting. Put away those binoculars. We haven’t got all night.”

  This came out with a distinctly testy edge. Sally Parks had the patience of Job, heaven knew, but in the newspaper that morning she’d read about a television show she wanted to watch. It came on at nine p.m.

  Henrietta was unmoved. She’d turned her sights back down the pond again. “That child on the raft out there doesn’t know ponds,” she went on. “She’s splashing along like a drunken sailor, scaring things. She won’t see anything that way.”

  Sally stepped forward. “Miss Cutting! I don’t mean to rush you, but the doctor has said you must drink your milk. When you don’t, you know what happens.”

  “What?” said Henrietta, still gazing through the window.

  “Why, you don’t sleep well,” Sally said. “You’re up all night with those terrible dreams. Now, here is your milk. Shall I help you drink it?”

  Sally raised the glass rather threateningly. These bedtime wrangles were turning into a problem. They could go on for hours of coaxing and pleading.

  “Oh! Let me be!”

  “There now, another sip,” Sally said, snatching the binoculars away and putting them out of sight under Henrietta’s chair.

  “Oh! Give them back!”

  “Here’s the rest, dear.” Sally handed her the glass and stood by while she drank. Then she drew the old woman to her feet and ushered her firmly across the floor to her bed, paying not the least attention to her complaints.

  The medication had a fast reaction. In no more than ten minutes Henrietta’s resistance began to give way. Her long, spare body, still strong for its eighty-some years, relaxed under the coverlet. Her head fell back on the pillow.

  “That’s it,” said Sally Parks, unhooking Henrietta’s glasses deftly from the backs of her ears and placing them on the bedside table. “You just lie quiet now, honey. Think about that child on the raft. You grew up around here, didn’t you? I’ll bet you had a raft when you were young. I’ll bet you were out there, full of your sass, tearing up and down the pond.”

  “No, I wasn’t!” Henrietta would have said if only she could. The thought was there in her head, but her lips wouldn’t work anymore. The milk had gotten to them.

  No, I wasn’t tearing up and down. I was poling along slow and silent, moving like a shadow through the reeds. I was listening and watching. There’s nothing like a raft for sneaking up on things.

  In the midst of this explanation, it suddenly seems to Henrietta Cutting that she’s released from Sally’s grip. She is lifted by a great gush of air, swept out the window, and flown down to the surface of the pond, where she finds herself poling along across open water, just as she used to.

  There’s her house with the high-dormered roof, where her family came every summer, down from Providence. There are her father and mother, and her nurse, Ella. There are her two dogs! What were their names? Oh yes, Gypsy and Sam. There she is, riding on her raft, the one she made with her own hands, hammered together so well that it never fell apart. It was always waiting for her, summer after summer, in some niche of pond bank. A miracle, when you thought of it, lasting through those blustery winters.

  “Though I do recall how I took pains to stow it away before we left every fall,” Henrietta muses. Half of her, it seems, is floating on the raft, while the other half looks down from some place in time slightly above and beyond.

  “I’d haul it out with a rope onto the bank just below the Coopers’ cottage, where the land curves in behind a rock. I thought it’d be safe there from the north wind.”

  Safe.

  Suddenly Henrietta sees, as if it really were before her eyes, the tall embankment below the Coopers’ that announced the beginning of the ocean beach. She sees the small, haystack-shaped rock where an eagle once tried to build a nest. (It was blown away!) She sees her father on shore, waving and calling:

  “Come home, Henny! There’s a storm on the way.”

  She’s stayed out too long. Deep-purple clouds are bearing down on the pond. Waves are splashing up over her feet. There isn’t much you can do when the wind starts to blow that hard off the ocean. Except kneel down and paddle. Paddle fast with your hands.

  “Get down, Henny. Work your way over here!” The wind roars past her ears, carrying her father’s words.

  How he’d loved her. She felt the warmth of it still, after all these years. He would’ve jumped in and swum out to rescue her if he’d had to. That day she’d paddled in on her own, made it through the waves to
where he waited on shore. He’d pulled her onto dry land and wrapped his arms around her. “My strong girl,” he said. “I have you. Safe.”

  None of this does Henrietta say or show the least evidence of to Sally Parks. But it is in her mind, a mind surrounded now by encroaching borders of age, so that its shores are reedy and no longer always visible to those around her; a mind upon which mists rise and depart at unpredictable moments, where memories fly up like swans off water and thoughts ride out alone across a wide blue surface.

  Like a child on a raft. Like a girl on a raft long ago and at this moment.

  So long ago, Henrietta thinks in silent surprise. And here it is, coming around again. She sees time in her mind as a slow revolving globe.

  So I am responsible. I have called out this child! Henrietta concludes. She’s flown up off the pond and is back in her own bedroom now.

  Except she doesn’t know how to go quietly on a raft. What she needs is a pole. Oh, where is my pole? I must look to see where I last laid it!

  It wasn’t ten minutes more before Sally Parks was tiptoeing out of the room, closing the door, and heading downstairs to the kitchen, while the old lady snored herself into oblivion. And not a moment too soon. That television program was just coming on.

  FOUR

  Anyone would suppose that with an entire pond at their door and an ocean down the road, water would be the least problem in the Kettels’ little vacation cottage. Just the opposite; they had to think about it all the time. Water pressure was so low that the shower delivered only the feeblest trickle. Toilets belched and backed up. Faucets spit, then stopped. Spit and stopped.

  It was easy to see “why this dump wasn’t already rented,” as Julia whispered to Jessie out of earshot of their father. He called them wimps and babies for complaining. “You’ve been living too long in the lap of luxury!” he blustered.

  On the phone from Pittsburgh, their mother suggested that the entire house, built so close to a marsh, was probably in violation of federal codes. Environmental law was her specialty.

  “It’s not a marsh,” snapped Richard Kettel, speaking into the plastic receiver of the only telephone in the house, an old-fashioned rotary-dial model. “It’s a lovely old pond, and in case you’re wondering, we’re all happy as clams here.”