Quicksand Pond

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “Well, I hope you’re not drinking the water.”

  “We are!”

  “Your mother doesn’t like my choice of vacation destinations,” he told the children after he’d hung up. “She seems to think our lives are in danger.”

  “You don’t have the best track record in that department,” Julia observed. “Remember that raging river we had to swim when you got us lost in Montana?”

  “That was the guide, not me, and it was hardly a raging river.”

  “What about the time we were sailing on Lake Arthur and you ran us into the mud, and night was coming and we had to call the lake patrol to get us out?” Jonathan said.

  Their father heaved a sigh and did not reply.

  Water was not the only problem.

  “The electrical system is shot,” their father admitted after the second blackout. “Watch out for sparks when you plug anything in. And no more hair dryers.” He looked at the girls. “And don’t run the toaster oven for longer than two minutes.”

  “Are we allowed to use the blender?” Julia asked sweetly. She was known to live on fruit and veggie smoothies at home.

  “There is no blender,” Jonathan pointed out.

  “Brilliant,” she said, flattening him with a look. The Julia of old was clearly on the rise.

  There was no television, either—that went without saying. No radio. Julia had music on her smartphone, but she didn’t allow anyone else to use her earphones. “And I can’t download anything new!” she complained. “I’m listening to the same stuff over and over.”

  “So live with it,” her father told her. “Personally, I think it’s a relief to have silence for a change. And darkness. Have you been out to look at the stars? Here we are, face-to-face with the natural world. We should take advantage of it. There are candles in the bottom drawer of the hall chest, in case of emergency.”

  “This whole place is an emergency,” Julia muttered.

  “We’re getting to find out what it was like to live a hundred years ago,” Jessie proposed.

  “Like in the Dark Ages!” Jonathan crowed, which made everyone laugh.

  For the most part, though, the Kettel family was not together laughing. By the end of the first week, they were not together at all, except by necessity at breakfast and dinner. Almost immediately they found themselves swept into different channels.

  Julia met up with a group her age on the beach—the erratic nature of wireless connection was a great conversation starter—and after that spent most of her time there with them. A boy in the group had a car and would come by shyly to pick her up. Julia, who considered shyness to be a defect in men, called him the Silent Lamb and did not give him any credit for these rides.

  Jonathan and his father visited various haunts, like the fish docks at the harbor and the local hardware store, where they bought fuses and mousetraps and pieces of wire for mending the screens.

  Then Jonathan also found friends—especially Philip, who had a swimming pool and invited Jonathan over nearly every day to play Marco Polo.

  “Why anyone needs a swimming pool in their backyard when they live three minutes from a beach, I don’t know,” their father said. “It’s the worst kind of excess.”

  He remembered the town as a simple country place where fishermen chugged around the sleepy harbor and milkmen delivered fresh cream and eggs from neighboring farms. Since then it had apparently fallen into the hands of the idle rich. With Jonathan away, he spent his time alone, reading on the partly shaded back porch of the cottage. He drove to the general store in the village for groceries, visited the tiny library there and the old graveyard on the town green. Sometimes he could be seen writing by hand on a yellow pad. He’d forgotten how he used to do that, he said, how close a simple pencil could bring a person to his own words.

  “Are you working on your novel?” Jessie asked, coming into the house alone late one afternoon. At home he’d been writing a novel, they all knew, writing it for years, with no end in sight. Jessie suspected this was one of the issues between her parents. Her mother was a person of swift and decisive action. She said she would do a thing, made a plan, and carried it out. Richard Kettel was a hedger and a circler.

  “Just jotting down some notes,” he answered vaguely. “This place is great for background. The old parts, I mean, that have been here for years. This is where I started writing, you know, the summer I was here. I’ve had it in my mind to come back for a long time. Simplicity and quiet. What’ve you been doing?”

  “Oh, walking around.”

  “Walking around where?”

  “Just . . . around.”

  It sounded false even to Jessie’s ears, and it was. The truth was, she’d gone back to the raft, had been out on it several more times without telling anyone. Why the big secret? Perhaps it was Julia. Julia might have laughed. She might have said: “A raft? Grow up! The beach is where everything happens around here. Everyone who’s anyone is down there.”

  Which was true. Jessie wasn’t a loner. She wanted to be popular. She knew she should be down there fitting in, leaving an impression, proving what an interesting person she was.

  She knew, but . . . that summer something stronger pulled her toward the pond. She went to it whenever there was a moment to slip away. Stealthily she stepped out on the raft’s sodden planks and pushed off from the bank. She’d make for the edge of the cattails. There she’d stand for an hour breathing in the place, listening and watching for what lived there unseen. A frog stalking flies. Stick-leg bugs that walked on water. A mother duck and her fleet of tiny, corklike babies.

  She would have gone farther out, but the raft was too heavy to paddle by hand. Beyond the reeds she’d have needed an oar or a stick to push along with. Since nothing like that was available, she had to settle for staying close to shore.

  But that was about to change.

  FIVE

  Early morning. Everyone was asleep. The sun, just up, filtered through the reeds. The pond lay still in a mantle of mist. Jessie was picking her way, barefoot, toward the raft when a broad ray of sunlight broke through onto the ground. There, lying amidst weeds, almost invisible unless you happened to be stepping right over it, was a long, slender wooden pole.

  She stopped. How had this come to be here? It was as if someone had read her mind and left the pole for her to find. She bent closer, and as fast as the mystery had arisen, it faded and was solved. The pole was nothing more than a prop for the old clothesline. A second prop, actually. Another just like it was attached to the line in their cottage’s backyard.

  When the line sagged in the middle from too much wet laundry, you propped it up with this long notched pole so the clothes wouldn’t drag on the ground. Her father had explained it, though no one in the family had yet hung out even a pair of socks. They weren’t using the line except occasionally for wet beach towels. They took their dirty clothes up the road to a Laundromat. Or rather, her father took them. He didn’t mind. He was used to doing the wash at home. It was restful, he said. He could read undisturbed.

  Whatever the pole was meant to be, Jessie saw it in a new light now. She took it down to the raft and pushed away from the bank like a gondolier. She planted the notched end on the pond’s sticky bottom and pushed again. The raft glided out between the reeds.

  The water that morning rose only to the soles of her feet. Perhaps the raft had begun to dry out. The weather had been continuously bright and hot. She poled awkwardly at first. The trick was a stabbing and thrusting rhythm that took practice. After some tipping, and once losing her balance and falling all the way in, she reached the outer limits of the reeds.

  Without a pause she pushed off and sent the raft coasting out onto the pond’s glassy surface. The mist parted and she was alone, the only human alive on this blue summer morning. She passed a solitary stone chimney on the far shore where a cottage about the size of their own must once have stood. A cement foundation glistened in the sun like a child-size basketball court.


  She came up on the haystack-shaped island. It was really only a big granite rock with a coating of bird droppings on the crown, like snow on an Alpine peak. A pile of sticks clung to one side. A nest? She poled past.

  A grand house ringed with porches rose to view on shore, the same house whose distant roof she’d glimpsed before. She was amazed she’d come so far. When she turned to look back down the pond, it took a moment to recognize the gray smudge of her own cottage, tiny against the land. Quicksand Pond was larger than it appeared from shore. She felt vulnerable suddenly, too much on view, and brought the raft in closer to the reedy edge.

  From an inland place a dog began to bark. She went by a narrow wooden dock built out over the marsh grass. A line of buoys bobbed near shore. She was more skillful with the pole now, able to glide along smoothly with hardly any splashing. When she came upon a congregation of seagulls dozing on yet another decrepit dock, she passed them so quietly that not a single bird was disturbed.

  The alluring bend in the pond rose in front of her. Jessie decided to go around it, take a quick look, and turn back. By now breakfast would be under way in the Kettel kitchen. Her father had found wild blueberries on sale at a local fruit stand. He’d promised to make them blueberry pancakes last night after another uncomfortable phone call from their mother. (“You talk to her, I have nothing more to say,” he’d snapped, holding the receiver out to Julia.)

  The bend was really a bush-infested peninsula, a place where sand from the distant beach had been washed up in a ridge that reached out like a dark arm into the pond. Jessie took the raft around it. On the other side she heard voices coming through reeds, the low growl of a man’s voice and the higher tones of someone younger.

  “You come over here and get what’s coming to you.”

  “Leave me alone. You’re crazy.”

  “I’ll fix you this time.”

  “I didn’t do anything. Keep away from me.”

  Jessie heard the sound of a slap. Dimly, through the brush, she saw the shapes of two people struggling. The smaller figure gave a short, smothered cry, pulled away, and ran around the corner of a broken-down farmhouse. The man followed with a lazy, loping gallop, as if he knew it was only a matter of time before he’d catch up.

  Jessie stood frozen on the raft. For a long moment there was only the gentle lap of the pond around her. Then the running figure of a girl shot out from behind the house like a small, frantic bird and came toward the pond. The man appeared five seconds later, moving faster.

  “Get back here!”

  “Leave me alone!”

  The girl plowed into the reeds at the edge of the pond and began to beat her way through. As she waded deeper into the water, she began a desperate hitching and wallowing motion that was half swimming, half running on the pond’s muddy floor.

  The man didn’t attempt to follow her there. He detoured to a short dock at the water’s edge and jumped into a skiff tied up there. He flung off the rope, shipped the oars, and began to row with experienced quickness across open water toward where the girl had entered the reeds. She was still floundering in them, pushing her way through. Jessie suddenly understood that she was trying to cut through to the other side of the sand peninsula. This idea must have occurred to the man in the skiff at almost the same moment, because he backed his oars and turned the boat sharply. His intention now was to round the sand spit and intercept the girl on the other side. His back toward Jessie, he began to row straight at her.

  Jessie went into action. She poled the raft backward, away from the floundering girl, away from the angry man, who had already closed the distance between them by half and was coming across the water at a horrifying speed. Jessie rounded the bend, poled harder, and, gasping for breath, drove the raft deep into a narrow alley between some reeds. She turned and drew the reeds down to make a curtain around herself. There she cowered, and covered her ears against the sounds of the inevitable capture. A half minute went by. Then another half minute.

  Jessie lifted her hands off her ears. No sound of capture came. Instead, another noise was filtering into her hiding place: the watery slurp of someone moving stealthily through the reeds behind her. She whirled around.

  The girl. With slow and by now very tired hitches and wallows, she came toward the raft.

  “Shhh. Let me on.” Her face was dark red and bathed in sweat. She raised a finger to her lips and crawled on board. The raft, overweighted, sank under the water. Screened by reeds, submerged above their ankles, the two crouched side by side without speaking.

  The skiff appeared around the bend, a horizontal flicker through the upright reeds. It passed their hiding place, thrust forward with dangerous, knifelike stabs as the man stroked powerfully through the still pond water.

  “Come out of there, you little sneak!”

  Under Jessie the raft wobbled. The girl was shifting her weight. Or was she trembling?

  “Are you all right?” Jessie whispered.

  “Shhh! He can hear like a dog.”

  They crouched motionless, in silence.

  The skiff shot past going back the way it had come, toward the bend.

  “You’re going to get it when I catch you!” There was a tone to the man’s voice that made Jessie want to stop breathing, to stop even the blink of her eyelids in case he heard them. Her body locked down. Only her eyes kept pace with the flickering course of the boat.

  “You’ll be sorry,” the voice snarled. “You don’t know how sorry you’ll be.”

  He went around the bend and out of sight. The girl beside her relaxed her stiff posture. She stood up lightly.

  “He’ll stop looking now,” she whispered.

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s what he always says when he quits.” Wet strands of black hair were stuck to her thin face. One cheek was streaked with mud.

  “What happened?” Jessie whispered.

  The girl shrugged. “He says I stole ten bucks off him.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “Sure I did, like I always do.”

  “Oh.”

  “I told him he’d lost it somewhere when he was out last night. He just didn’t believe me. He should’ve believed me.” The girl looked directly at Jessie for the first time. “I mean, how else am I going to get money off him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Right. That’s the only way.”

  By now the girl had climbed down off the raft and was standing once more on the pond’s bottom, water up to her waist. The raft, with only Jessie on it, bobbed up again to the surface.

  “You should fix this thing so it floats better,” the girl said. “That big crosspiece on top is waterlogged.”

  “It is?”

  “Sure. If you just took it off, that side would come up and the whole raft would float better. I bet even two people could get on it then.”

  “Is that your name?” Jessie asked. The girl was wearing a chain necklace with the letters T-e-r-r-i in gold script, hanging like a charm below the hollow of her throat.

  “Terri,” Terri said. “In case you can’t read.”

  “Well, I can,” Jessie said. They glared at each other.

  Terri smoothed her name charm with the tips of two fingers. Her scornful expression softened. “Your raft’s floating pretty good now that I’m off it,” she said.

  Jessie nodded. “It brought me this far, anyway. I should probably get going before it totally sinks. Also I’m late for breakfast. My whole family will be wondering where I am.”

  “You’re renters, aren’t you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, see you around.” Terri plunged off through the reeds. Not heading in the direction of her house, going in the opposite direction. Jessie gave the raft a shove toward open water. Then she stuck the pole in and brought it up short.

  “What will you do now?” she called in a low voice.

  “Hang out somewhere.” Terri didn’t look back. She kept moving through the reeds toward sho
re. “I’ve got to wait till night, then I can go home. He goes off at night. By morning he’s forgotten what happened. Or come to his senses, one or the other.”

  “Is he . . .” Jessie hesitated. “Is he, you know, related to you?”

  “What do you think? He’s my father.” Terri glanced back at her.

  “Sorry. I mean . . .”

  “He gets mad sometimes, that’s all. Otherwise he’s okay. It’s no problem. I can handle it.”

  She began to move away from Jessie again.

  “Hey, wait! You can hang out with me for a while, if you want.”

  “Why?” Terri kept going.

  “Because.” Jessie hunted for an answer. “Because I need to fix this raft. You’re right. It doesn’t float too well.”

  The girl slowed, considering. She glanced in the direction of her house. Other figures had now appeared in the yard. More yelling had started up. She slicked her dark hair back from her face with both hands.

  “Thanks but no thanks. You can fix your own raft.”

  “Are you sure?” Jessie asked. “What about . . .”

  “All you need is a crowbar,” Terri said. She looked over her shoulder at her house again.

  “A crowbar. What’s that?”

  “Don’t you even know what a crowbar is?”

  “No.”

  “You renters are scary,” Terri said. “Where did you find this raft, anyhow? I know you didn’t build it.” She began to slosh back.

  “It was just in the water by the bank. Near our house.”

  “That’s strange. Do you know how strange that is? There’s never been a raft on this pond that I know of.”

  “Have you lived here for long?”

  “I was born here,” Terri said.

  “Well, come and jump on. It’s getting too deep to walk.”

  So Terri got up on the raft again, which immediately sank ankle-deep in the water. This made it hard, but not impossible, to pole along. They took turns, keeping close to the tall reeds so they wouldn’t be seen from shore. The yelling in Terri’s yard faded. In the distance the solitary stone chimney rose into view, a landmark that Jessie could steer by.