“Echo Lake is more than just a good debut novel. It is the coming-out party for Letitia Trent, the new poet-queen of neo-noir.”
—KYLE MINOR, author of Praying Drunk
“In Echo Lake, Letitia Trent, with deceptively simple, beautiful language, creates a small American town slowly self destructing under the weight of its secrets. Trent illuminates the mystery of family and community, the pain of loss, all the while spinning a tale of murder and suspense. It’s at turns a lovely and bone chilling read.”
—PAULA BOMER, author of Inside Madeleine
“In Echo Lake, Trent’s small town characters guard their secrets, and warn their children away from the mist-covered lake. Dark, ominous, and lyrical, Echo Lake is a beautiful exploration of loss, and the menace of deceptive surfaces.”
—KAREN BROWN, author of The Longings of Wayward Girls
“Trent’s debut novel combines a ripping good scare with prose as rich as dark verse. Her characters wear the imprint of the past like livid bruises, the bravest among them untangling their distorted histories to discover truths about the nature of community, family and self.”
—SOPHIE LITTLEFIELD, author of House of Glass
“Trent’s years as a poet serve her well in this heavily atmospheric novel, which deftly conjures up both evil and a small town’s complicit reluctance to face its past.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
DARK HOUSE PRESS
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of short passages quoted in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents, situations, institutions, governments, and people are fictional and any similarity to characters or persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
Published by Dark House Press, an imprint of Curbside Splendor Publishing, Inc., Chicago, Illinois in 2014.
First Edition
Copyright © 2014 by Letitia Trent
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014942039
ISBN 978-1-940430-03-4
Edited by Richard Thomas
Cover photograph by Helena Kvarnstrom
Interior photo © Lisa Valder/iStock
Designed by Alban Fischer
Manufactured in the United States of America.
www.thedarkhousepress.com
www.curbsidesplendor.com
1
Where are we going? Emily asked, and she heard her voice smaller and higher in her throat than it had been in years. She looked at her hands, white and smooth. She didn’t have that scar at her knuckle where she’d cut herself on a broken glass at the bottom of the sink, the cut she’d needed stitches for her senior year of college. On her feet were plastic jelly sandals, purple ones, her skin dusty between the crosshatching.
Her mother Connie drove with the windows down and was young again. She wore a sundress, and her hair was gathered in a high ponytail. Her blonde hair whipped around her face—the driver’s side window was opened just a crack and made a loud, sucking sound.
Her mother hummed and kept her eyes on the road.
But I’m thirty and my mother’s dead, Emily thought. She could not let herself imagine that life was otherwise. Even in dreams, she was not able to let go. She wished she could, but she knew: I am only dreaming. Connie was really dead. Emily was no longer a child. Everything was much worse than it looked right now.
Where are we going? Emily asked again, this time speaking over the sucking sound from the window.
Her mother turned to her and smiled, her cheeks bright, but her lips pale and dry. Connie never wore soft shades of lipstick, never had the soft feathered hair or chalky pale eye shadow of the television mothers in the eighties, the mothers Emily had so wished for as a child.
We’re going to Heartshorne, her mother said. We’re going home.
Emily sat up and looked out the blue-tinted window. The road before them was flat and empty of cars. They passed a ranch where the cows stared dully at the very edges of a thin, wire fence, chewing and chewing on what? The brown grass? Emily didn’t know. Her small body made her afraid to ask questions. She imagined that she might accidentally reveal to her mother what she knew—that Connie had died in two thousand and four of lung cancer. That Connie really hated Heartshorne. No matter how bad it is here, it’s better than where I came from, she’d tell Emily while awake late at night, pacing the living room while Patsy Cline sang on the tape from the tinny little boombox on the kitchen counter or cleaning until she was so exhausted she could only lay in bed smoking cigarettes.
Why are we going there? Emily asked. Connie rolled up the car window and the sucking sound stopped. She heard only the muffled inside sounds of the car now—the road rolling underneath their wheels and the sound of the wind trying to get in.
Why? Emily asked again. Connie kept her eyes on the road. They were coming up to sharp curves, some hills even, and though the grass was still brown, the trees were taller and houses scarcer. They were entering the country, not the rambling, long stretches of flatland but the closer, secret hollows of forest.
Because you can’t stay away from home for too long, she said. It makes you crazy. You can’t just leave. You have to understand why.
Listen, Emmy, she said, using the name that Emily had always wanted to hear whenever her mother was in one of her rare moods of happiness.
Emmy, you’ll be going home soon, she said. Make the most of it.
She touched Emily’s knee where her jeans had faded from playing in the dirt with her buckets and dolls and collections of dirty stuffed animals she treated as pets or children, depending on the game.
Emmy, I’m taking you home.
2
Emily woke at five thirty. The light outside was at the soft angle she loved but rarely got to see anymore. She used to stay up with Eric until five, after his gigs that lasted until well after midnight, days when she would go straight from gigs being with him to her early-morning work in tech support, her hair reeking of cigarettes and the hem of her dress smelling of gin where Eric had spilled his drink. Now, she worked a proper day job that required pumps and stockings, her hair arranged in some semblance of order, and a professional wardrobe of blacks and neutrals. They had health insurance now. They had moved into a larger apartment, closer to downtown Columbus, which didn’t mean much anymore. Downtown was dying, the malls empty of stores and people, the restaurants with service staff who spent more time on break than at work. But still, it was a central location and she could catch the bus from there.
She was alone in bed, the covers kicked onto the floor. She sat up, goose bumps traveling down her arms and legs in a wave. Her phone lit blue in the still-dark room. Eric had left a message at three—he had crashed at John’s after the gig. He’d be home sometime the next day. Love.
He’d used the word crashed like they had when there were just out of college, young enough to get carded and to stay up until dawn smoking cigarettes on the porches and steps of clubs or apartments.
Five years. Thinking about how long she’d been with Eric made her tired. She missed those early mornings, everything hatching, even the light weak and new, and being young enough to feel that you weren’t hurting anything or wasting any time by being awake when others were still sleeping.
Now, it pained her to stay up too late. So much of the next day was wasted.
Emily rose—she couldn’t go back to sleep now—and put the bed back together, tucking the blankets and sheets in tight. Her feet and hands were stiff with cold, but she couldn’t stand the look of an abandoned, messy bed. Her mother had never been much interested in made beds, washed dishes, or outward signs of order. Em
ily had developed that habit on her own. As a child, she’d made her bedroom an oasis of order and calm, her dresses organized by color, her toys displayed or tucked away, never on the floor. She had learned how to contain herself tightly in small spaces, like trailer bedrooms and corners of studio apartments.
At eight AM, still an hour and a half from when she had to clock in for work, she decided to bring Eric breakfast—she’d leave it at the door, of course, not barge in and disturb them. It would be like old times, when she used to go out in the clothes she’d slept in to buy juice and bread to soak up the night’s leftover alcohol.
The man at the bakery counter didn’t recognize her. It had been years since he’d seen her two or three times a week at ungodly hours, stumbling in with her skin and hair greasy from being in a close, hot space all night. She dressed differently now, too. A slim, pencil skirt, heels clacking. But she looked otherwise the same, she hoped. Same dirty-blonde hair, same thin lips and big eyes, same long, oval face. Had she become noticeably older? Probably. She wished she could see what the man at the counter saw, but his eyes swept over her face, uninterested.
Beautiful morning, he said.
She remembered the dream then, her mother driving, how she’d known that she was dreaming and hoped that she wasn’t all at the same time. In that car with the cracked window, the hissing, sucking sound, it had looked like a beautiful day then, too. Not a city beautiful day with its walkers and light streaming between buildings. It had been a beautiful day empty of people, all light and all sky from window edge to window edge.
It is, she said. She smiled at the man and walked out, enjoying the sound of her shoes, the feeling of her dress fabric whisking, the chill in the air that made her face cool and red.
She hadn’t intended to look through the window before she knocked on the door. It was only because the windows were wide, large as a double-door, curtainless, and because the white screen of a computer was on, casting its blues onto a couple on the floor. They lay on the opened insides of a sleeping bag, naked. It was Eric and a woman. Or a girl, more like it, blonde and small, her hands folded under her head like a child taking a nap. One breast fell out on to the floor, flattened and sad.
Emily left the coffee and bagels at the doorstep. She wrote a note on the receipt and went to work, her hands shaking.
Fool, she thought all day at work as she filed documents and made phone calls and input numbers flawlessly into a computer program. You’ve been a fool.
She was surprised at herself, the calm she felt below the anger, which roiled and sickened her, as she knew it should, but where did it come from? Below the tumult, she was still and small, a receding pool. She should be devastated, throwing plates at the walls as people did when angry in movies or books: coming home early to beat Eric’s chest, clawing his face, doing something more than feeling sick to her stomach and knowing that this would go away soon enough, and that when it was away, there would be hardly any trace of him.
•
Eric packed up all of his clothes, his instruments, and half of the music collection, though Emily had bought the Pixies and Velvet Underground boxed sets and protested when he packed them.
They were gifts, he said, his voice stuck in a permanent whine. He had cried when she told him what she’d seen, that she wanted him to leave, which had surprised her and then disgusted her when it happened again, after she insisted that yes, it was over, and he had to leave by the end of the week. She’d been crying, too, but he did not seem moved by her tears. She had been ready to be upset, to crawl into bed and stay there for days, to fall into a depression from the anticipation of missing him, but he had saved her from that. He so annoyed her with his attempts to make her feel responsible for his sadness that she couldn’t feel anything but anger toward him, which she liked. It was good to be angry, enlivening, even. It wasn’t a feeling she had indulged in before she’d found him naked, holding that girl on the floor.
It wasn’t just the girl, she realized as the tears and shouting unfolded. It was their entire life together. He had made her his wife. She was responsible for everything, and he was free to live as he liked on the back of her work. She wasn’t willing to do it anymore.
She refused to help him pack, refused to do anything but give him time and space to disentangle his belongings from hers.
Fuck it. Take anything you want, she told him, too tired, after almost five years of bending her desires to his, to argue. Leaving it all to him was a relief. He could choose to throw away what he wanted. When he finally left, she’d get rid of the rest.
Emily left him with his boxes, took a towering pile of mail from the kitchen counter, and stood at the end of the block where the walk sign blinked on. She didn’t cross the street. She leaned on an empty newspaper box and closed her eyes. She imagined he’d be in the kitchen, fixing something alcoholic, ready to assail her with his moping, the only thing he could do with much skill or gusto (he was only a mediocre guitarist, she secretly thought, and an execrable songwriter), when she returned.
Emily sat on the stoop of the tattoo parlor by the apartment and opened the day’s mail in the light of its fluorescent signs. Inside the shop, people were getting things stamped on their bodies—the names of lovers and children, bands and brands and flowers and pin-up girls. She could hear the whirr of tattoo guns from outside, the buzzing like a dentist’s drill.
She set aside everything addressed to Eric except for the things that she paid that happened to be in his name (so he could build some good credit to counteract the bad debt of old parking tickets and long-ignored student loans). It was mostly his mail—bills, fliers for gigs and bars, magazines for cigars and music. At the bottom of the pile, there was a letter addressed to her by hand from Oklahoma. The envelope was thick and heavy, the paper fine. She opened it carefully along a narrow edge. This was the most beautiful letter she’d ever received. Even the ink was rich and black, furred slightly at the edges where it sunk into the veiny fibers of the paper.
Eric was in bed by the time she came back inside, the television and stereo quiet, the bedroom door closed. She pushed a week’s worth of magazines and scarves and jackets onto the floor and lay on the couch without getting a pillow, sheet, or blanket. Usually, she took the room and he took the couch, but tonight she didn’t want to try to wake him from his boozy, red-eyed sleep.
The letter from Oklahoma was nestled in her purse like a golden ticket.
3
The lake was not clean. The bottom went down farther than anyone could see. What would they find there if they could swim down the bottom and look? Was there even a bottom anymore?
Connie sat on the wooden dock next to her, looking much as Emily remembered her before she grew sick and thin.
Look, Connie said. There’s a whole town under there.
Emily imagined people swimming to work, the underwater grocery store with melons and apples floating in the air above their bins, the vacuum packs of sandwich meat spinning.
What do you mean? Emily looked down at her hands and saw that they were her adult hands—scarred in three places, older than her years, a few dim, silver rings.
You’ll find out, Connie said.
They sat for a while longer, not speaking. Emily wanted to reach out to her mother and hug her. It seemed like an appropriate time—a sunset, a lake, the air warm and without even a shift of cold in its wind—but she was afraid. What if she hugged her too close and dropped them both into the lake? What if they fell down into the lake town and nobody knew them and they were not welcome?
4
She couldn’t place the accent of the man on the telephone. His voice was quick, the inflections sharp. He shouted, but without anger. It was simply the way he spoke.
It’s good to hear from you—we prayed that we had the right address and that our letter would find you!
Thank you. Emily wondered if they really had prayed or if it was only an expression.
You never know with them, she heard her moth
er’s voice, gravelly between mouthfuls of smoke (she never inhaled, only filled her mouth with smoke, a habit which had not saved her from cancer). They’ll pray for most anything. Pray you find a parking spot. It’s a way to make you beholden to them and their prayers.
But that wasn’t such a bad thing, was it? Maybe what she needed were some prayers.
Emily pushed the thoughts aside. The voice was open and kind. It was her escape.
So what are the next steps? She asked.
Emily took a notepad from a stack of yellow pads that Eric had left. On the first page, he had started a lyric:
Black fingers break
the lake gray and hard as a nickel
She ripped the page free and crumpled it into a tight ball. She didn’t even feel a twinge of guilt, though she had to admit these lyrics were better than his usual grade-school rhyming couplets. She made her list, clean, simple, and freeing. Better than any of Eric’s lyrics had ever been.
She had been rootless before the letter. Sure she wanted to leave Eric and Columbus, but she was unsure where to go. She had no family that she knew and had few friends that were not his friends, too.
She was unused to doing things on her own. In the last five years, she’d hardly driven more than half an hour by herself, had not seen a movie alone or eaten dinner alone at a sit-down restaurant, had never thought of her money as her own, only our money. The only significant time she’d had to herself was when she had visited her mother in the hospital, early on in their relationship. She had relied on Eric to be the one who introduced her to the world. He was good at it. His big, open face and easy talk invited people in, not to mention his music. She had once been like this, too. She’d been popular in college, had even played drums in a band, that’s how she’d met Eric, but during her years with Eric, she’d forgotten how to be the object of other people’s attention.
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