Stephen picked his way around the remains, turning over a ruined fortress wall with his toe. He glanced back at William.
“Liar.” He said it with half a smile as though he was still capable of playing along. “I might have known you’d make a scene.”
He looked out to the edge of the copse where the adjoining field of grey fallow grass stretched upwards to the curve of the hillside.
Already he was tiring of the game. He turned on his heel and marched back the way they had come. When William didn’t follow him immediately, Stephen stopped and looked back.
“Father’s calling,” he said.
William shook his head stubbornly. He’d not heard anything, but he followed anyway as he always did.
#
That evening, William’s father did something he’d never done before. He came to visit his youngest son in his bedroom. Still wearing his hunting clothes, he brought the smell of smoke and sulphur into the narrow room on the second floor.
At first, neither of them spoke a word. William had already been in bed, and at the sound of the door opening, he’d swung out from under the covers to sit on the edge of the frame. A stripe of shadow hid his father’s face, but William felt his eyes on him. Sharp and unwavering, they trapped him where he sat.
His father cleared his throat.
“You must be patient with your brother,” he said. “Stephen is experiencing new things, a world away from this life you’ve both become used to. You need time. You both need time.”
He turned to go and for a moment, William saw Stephen was waiting in the hallway outside. He too was dressed in his outdoor clothes. There was a lantern at his feet and something tall propped by his side which glinted brief and dull grey in the shaft of moonlight that fell through the window. William recognised the wooden stock had seen the day before, wrapped in cloth and hanging across Briggs’ back.
His father turned back to William, blocking the view; his watch chain glinted in the hallway light like the flash of a smile.
“You mustn’t be jealous of him,” he said. “Next year you’ll be at Greyhurst yourself. Next year, you’ll understand.”
He pulled the door to, and it was open barely a crack when he spoke again.
“Next year, William,” he said, “it’ll be you.”
He closed the door. Somewhere outside, a dog barked. And once again, William was alone.
The Lake
Daniel Mills
August, 1997.
Samuel is twelve years old. He despises himself: his thin limbs, his hairless body. His friend Jason is thirteen but looks nearer sixteen. Jason is a Boy Scout and natural athlete, pitcher for the town’s Little League team. The boys have known each other for years.
Samuel’s house is less than a mile from the lake. Most evenings the boys ride bikes to the dam , but tonight they will walk, because Nick is coming with them.
They met Nick in July at church camp where Samuel’s father was pastor. Nick lives with his father in the next town and attends a different middle school. He is pale, heavy, asthmatic. He wheezes when he runs, breasts bouncing in the shirts he wears to swim.
It is early evening, not yet suppertime. Samuel and Jason watch for Nick from the living room window. His father’s truck pulls up short of the house. Its red body gleams, the hubcaps like silver sunbursts. The driver is visible through the windshield, the dark glasses that hide his eyes. His skin is shockingly pale, hands white where they grip the wheel.
Nick dismounts from the cabin and totters up the lawn. His father pulls out, the engine roaring as it gathers speed.
The boys pelt outside, anxious to swim. They meet Nick on the porch and set off with him, following the road along the lakeshore, its floating docks and ranks of summer cottages. Samuel and Jason go first, nearly running, while Nick trails behind, panting, pleading with them to slow down, to wait. They do not.
Eventually, they reach the dam. It is long disused: the sluices blocked with rust, the concrete chipped and pitted. The boys remove their shoes and socks. They scale the hemlock which overhangs the dam and lower themselves to the ledge.
Jason goes first, then Samuel, then Nick. Samuel knows: Nick is frightened. He trembles as he releases his grip from the hemlock and stands unsupported on the dam. A motorboat passes, startling the gulls from a nearby thicket. The noise of the engine tails off to a drone then silence though the waves continue to move in its absence, spreading over the lake’s surface like the cracks in a mirror.
The ledge is slick, wet with spray from the lake five feet below. Samuel, cautious, steps carefully over the dam, hooking his toes in the crumbling concrete. He goes from pockmark to crater, listening all the while for Nick’s breath behind him: the catch in the other boy’s throat, the occasional wheeze.
Jason is far ahead of them. Confident of his footing, he walks the ledge with an acrobat’s grace, slowing only as he nears the center of the dam. Samuel has not been out so far, has never dared, but Nick is behind him and he does not want to appear afraid and so says nothing.
They reach the dam’s center. The ledge is highest here. Behind them an old streambed runs downhill past a cottage shuttered for season’s end then bends out of sight beyond a stand of hemlocks. The dark trees shimmer. The day’s rain webs their foliage, hangs from branch and needle. The lake is calm, all waves dissipated. Samuel looks down at his reflection far below.
Jason strips off his shirt. The muscles show in his arms and shoulders as he raises his hands, joining them together over his head. He turns his wrists one against the other and stretches, bending himself from side to side.
Samuel asks: “What are you doing?”
“Limbering up.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to dive.”
“Here? It’s too high.”
“Ten feet, maybe. No more than that. Same as the diving board at the Y.”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t dive, then. I’ll do it myself.”
Jason drops to a squat. His legs tense. He straightens, readying himself for the jump.
Nick says: “Wait.”
Samuel wheels around. He watches dumbly as Nick snorts from his inhaler and shuffles forward past him. The fat bunches at his elbows. His nipples show through his tee shirt.
He says: “I’ll jump with you.”
Jason grins. “Okay, then,” he says.
Samuel reddens and retreats down the ledge. He turns his back on the others, faces the boarded-up cottage. The windows are shut, the doors padlocked.
Behind him Jason and Nick line up at the edge of the dam. He hears them, their breathing. Jason counting down from three. “One.”
They jump. Samuel glances behind him, sees Jason fall with his back curved in upon itself and hands thrust out even as Nick steps forward timidly and drops from the ledge feet-first.
The air rushes up toward Nick, unbalancing him as he falls and flipping him onto his back. His tee shirt inflates, rides up, revealing his chest: the breasts like lumps of dough, the lines of yellow bruising near the waistband of his trunks. He strikes the water and plunges toward the bottom. Samuel’s reflection unravels with the impact, shattered in the whorl of rising bubbles.
Jason breaches the water. He is some distance from the dam and making for the lake’s center. His strokes are perfect: he cleaves the water with the ease of a boat’s prow, his wake rippling behind him.
Samuel waits. Nick does not resurface.
The water re-knits itself, becoming smooth as glass. Samuel’s face floats within it, a perfect image: the lines round his mouth, the lips wide as he yells for help. His throat yawns before him, black with the shadow from a dying eddy.
His voice is broken, shrill. It is enough. Jason hears him and turns round. He swims back toward the dam, shouting to Samuel as he draws near. He urges Samuel to jump in, to help, but Samuel cannot. His legs refuse to move, his eyes to close.
Jason dives, surfaces. There are weeds in his hair, water s
treaming down his face.
“Where is he?” he demands. “Can you see him?”
But the lake is a mirror, obscuring all save Samuel’s own pinched face, the tongue flapping uselessly against the dark of his throat. Jason swears and forces himself under again—longer this time though he comes up gasping, alone. He treads water briefly, breathing hard. Two deep breaths and he submerges himself for a third time, disappearing behind Samuel’s reflection.
At last he resurfaces, Nick’s head lolling on his shoulder. The other boy is limp in his arms, pressed close to his chest as he holds him up, kicking them both toward shore.
Samuel runs to meet them. He sheds his paralysis and sprints along the dam, forgetting his earlier caution. His bare feet sting as they slap the concrete.
Jason reaches the rocks near the end of the dam and pulls himself from the water. He drags himself forward with one hand then turns to hauls up Nick behind him.
There is blood in the boy’s scalp and his tee shirt hangs loosely from his neck. His exposed chest appears soft, rubbery, white but for the bruises at his waist. They form a mottled line, purple and yellow, which disappears into his underwear.
Samuel sees them first, then Jason.
They look at each other, look away.
Jason takes Nick’s wrist in hand and listens for the pulse. He cradles the boy’s neck between his legs and leans forward, covering Nick’s lips with his mouth.
He breathes in, out.
Nick startles and coughs. Jason exhales heavily, falling back. The strength drains from Samuel’s legs, and he drops to his knees.
The coughing subsides. Nick’s eyelids flutter and open.
His eyes are bulging, wild and white.
#
Samuel tells no one what happened that day. Jason, too, is silent but only because Samuel begs him not to tell. His fear still eats at him, his shame or something more.
Fall comes and with it school, the seventh grade. Nick disappears from their lives, and it is winter, January, when Samuel sees him again.
Early morning: sun coming up, gray smudges on thick cloud cover. Samuel sits in his mother’s car at the end of the driveway, waiting for the school bus.
The morning is cold, below zero. The heat vents rattle. Samuel’s head rests against the window, his breath misting on the pane.
Through that fog he watches the red pickup truck come barreling down the road, driving too quickly for the ice on the roads. Nick’s father. Samuel recognizes the black glasses, the pale hands on the wheel, and then the truck is past them.
A face at the rear windshield: Nick. He is as pale as his father and his mouth is open, a black circle.
#
The years pass and Samuel is seventeen, a senior in high school. In the spring he gets his license and takes to driving the lake-roads at night, circling round and round the lake.
Most nights, Jason rides with him, the water-pipe in hand and the windows down, the night-air breaking like waves around them. Jason offers the pipe to Samuel but always he refuses, thinking of his father’s disapproval, and weeks pass in this way before he caves.
Tonight they trade hits from Jason’s water-pipe and park below the dam. “Leave the music on,” Jason says, and Modest Mouse is playing as they climb out, slam the doors.
The car’s headlights shine on the wall of the dam before them, the hemlock-branches through which they climb. They reach the dam and lower themselves down. Stand side-by-side on the ledge, their shadows stretching ahead of them into the water.
The night is clear. The stars are out, the bow of the Milky Way visible. It joins with its reflection on the water to form an ellipse, an open mouth.
“Well, shit,” says Jason. “That’s really something.”
Samuel is slow to respond. When he does he says it is like the future that waits for them, ready to swallow them whole. He is thinking of the coming autumn, when Jason will leave for college, but Jason, laughing, tells him he is stoned.
So they talk of other things: Boy Scouts and church camp and summers spent swimming at the dam. One morning in particular when they donned goggles and snorkels and swam out to the center of the lake which marked the boundary between two towns. They crossed the border, Samuel remembers, then turned round and swam back to shore.
Jason asks: “You think you still have those snorkels?"
“Sure. Back at the house.”
“What do you say we try them out?”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright.”
It is after midnight. They walk back to the house and let themselves into the mudroom. The snorkels are in the closet along with two sets of goggles, the lenses gray with dust and spider silk. Samuel hands one set to Jason and takes the other for himself.
Silently, then, they slip outside, drawing the door shut behind them. Returning to the dam, they strip to their boxer shorts and climb the hemlock. Jason squats and leans forward to rinse his snorkel in the lake-water. Samuel follows suit then takes the mouthpiece between his lips. He gags at the taste: mud, mildew, puddled snowmelt.
Jason laughs, his face hidden behind his goggles. Samuel turns from him and looks out toward the lake, its center. His breath moans in the snorkel.
The moon is waning. The stars cut brighter for the ranks of darkened cottages all around, and the Milky Way is on the water, rippling, opening from itself to receive them as they step forward and drop from the edge.
Samuel hits the water. The lake closes over him, colder than he expected. It sloshes over the snorkel-top and fills his mouth so that he comes up coughing, blind where the lake has seeped into his goggles.
He treads water. “Jason?” he manages.
A voice drifts back to him. “Yeah?”
Jason is ten feet away, nearer the shore, where the lake is shallow enough for him to stand. His bare chest is visible where it thrusts from the water, a web of stars.
Samuel says: “Nothing.”
Jason leans forward and submerges his head. He wades along the shore, parting the water before him with his hands.
Samuel empties his goggles and snorkel and begins to swim. The lake-bottom rises out of the blackness as he nears the shallows, the shore.
His toes touch mud and he continues at a walk, wading as Jason did with his goggles submerged in the water. Beyond the glass the lake-bottom appears as a moonscape, lit by stars and cratered where his feet break through it, raising plumes of muddy debris.
He rotates his head toward the lake’s center, the line dividing his town from Nick’s. The water is deepest there, he knows, and before him the darkness draws itself into thin bands interspersed with beams of light, stars shining through from above.
All is quiet. Samuel is conscious of no sound save the whistle of air in the snorkel, the slow and even lapping of the lake. The weeds ripple beyond his goggles, the mud blossoming before him at each step. He spreads his arms and brings his hands together, dividing stars from darkness from whirling mud.
The silence is broken.
Samuel hears a heavy splash behind him, as though someone else has fallen from the dam. Panting, grunting. The sounds of frantic swimming.
He spins round, startled. He tears the goggles from his head.
Jason is halfway out of the water, running. He reaches the rocks and scrambles up them, and he must have lost his boxers somehow, because Samuel sees that he is naked, his buttocks showing, white and wiry. He vanishes over the lip of the dam.
Samuel goes after him. He thrashes a path through the shallows and bolts up the wet rocks. He falls once, twice, cutting open his foot. He reaches the dam and vaults over the edge, swinging himself down from the hemlock.
Jason is in the car. The passenger-side door is open and he has draped himself in a red gingham picnic blanket. He holds the pipe between his teeth with the lighter in one hand and the other hand cupped round, trying to coax a spark.
“It’s nothing,” he says, mumbling. “Freaked myself out, that�
��s all.”
“All? You scared me.”
“Thought I saw something. In the water.”
“What did you see?”
Jason shakes his head, will say nothing more.
Samuel retrieves their clothes from the dam. When he returns to the car, he finds Jason seated with eyes closed and pipe lit, smoke curling up from his open mouth.
Samuel starts the car, pulls out. Jason dresses himself in the dark while Samuel averts his gaze, watching the road unfold in the glare of the high-beams.
The sound of his breathing is unnaturally loud to him. He turns on the radio.
Jason’s house. Jason crosses the lawn with his hands in his pockets and mounts the steps to the screened-in porch. Samuel watches. The headlights strike through the screens, making shadows like nets which close over him, catching Jason as he turns, waves, disappears inside.
#
The separation happens slowly, by degrees. On Friday, Samuel calls Jason’s house and speaks to his mother. She tells him Jason is out. “Lauren came by and picked him up.”
Lauren? The name means nothing to him. Samuel spends the night in bed with his headphones on and his face to the ceiling, the fan-blades going around.
The weekend passes with no word from Jason. Sunday night, Samuel goes out walking. His footfalls carry him up hill to the lake, the dam—and that is where he sees them, seated together on the ledge. Jason with his back bent forward, his head in his hands. The girl beside him with her arm extended, hand spread across his back. She is speaking to him softly, almost whispering. Jason’s shoulders shake.
Samuel skulks back to the house, says nothing of what he saw. In school the boys continue to greet each other, passing in the hallway, but Jason takes to spending the weekends with Lauren and week-nights, too, once summer arrives.
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