Echo Lake

by Letitia Trent

  Well, you might lose somebody from the boat. But not everyone. You’ll remain, at least. You’ll make it.

  She felt sudden pinpricks under her eyelids at his words. You’ll make it. She had not known how much she needed to hear those word and believe them. Don’t cry, she told herself, and bit her lip, squinting her eyes in what she hoped might look like intense concentration.

  And what about my future, she asked. Though you say it doesn’t exist. The Fool. It doesn’t sound good.

  He picked up the card and handed it to her. What do you think is about to happen to the Fool?

  He’s just about the fall off the cliff, she said automatically. She had not looked deeply at the card, being too distracted by the brush of his rough thumb against her palm as he passed the card.

  She tried to look again at the card closely, as he had instructed. She liked the way that the fool wasn’t looking where he was going. He looked instead in the opposite direction, at where the music flew from his instrument, not at something so banal and obvious as his own feet.

  He won’t fall, she decided. I take it back. He’ll notice the dog tugging at him.

  Jonathan nodded. I like that, he said. You have a new start when this is over, when you’ve found out everything you need to know. You will feel foolish and embarrassed at first, it might even mean throwing away what you’ve started and beginning something new, but you will do it. And you won’t fall.

  He set the cards down and sat back in his seat. He crossed his arms and nodded at the spread. Any questions?

  She looked at the images, her past and present and future, bright and fixed within the gold borders of the cards.

  So the Fool isn’t bad?

  Nope.

  It doesn’t mean I’ll fall over the cliff, or make a fool of myself?

  Well, you might make a fool of yourself, he said. But that’s a strange thing to be afraid of, isn’t it?

  She nodded. Surely, at this point, she’d gone over her half hour. As if reading her mind, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket to check the time.

  Our time is up, he said, but remember what I said; the future doesn’t even exist. The cards are only a guess at one possible future. He swept her cards up, shuffled them back together, and placed them in the box. Then he ushered her from the tiny room. Out of the room, she took a deep, clean breath. The smell of incense was in her nose and on her clothes, making her sneeze when she stepped out into the cleaner air of the store. Her head swam and ached vaguely, as it did on mornings when she woke with a slight hangover from drinking bad wine in bed out of a Styrofoam cup. It was hard to tell exactly how much wine you actually had when drinking it out of a Styrofoam cup. She rubbed her eyes as Jonathan rang up her reading and the little bag of dried sage she had picked impulsively from the incense display.

  Driving out some bad spirits? Jonathan nudged the baggie of sage toward her hand.

  Maybe so, she said. She looked up at him. Can I come back for a follow-up reading, if I want to know more? Jonathan put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a business card. Give me a call, he said.

  She looked at the card. His name and number and a small, crescent moon in the corner. Thank you.

  And give me a call anyway, he said, if you want somebody to show you around town. We don’t get many new people, at least not brand new ones. Just people like me who leave but can’t stay away.

  She paused, holding the card in her hand.

  Really, he said. I would love to show you around.

  Thank you, she said. I’ll give you a call.

  I’m being completely serious, he said. He leaned forward on the counter, his elbows on the table. Please call. I get lonely with only my sister and my parents. It’s hard to meet people here, as you’ve probably figured out.

  She nodded, both happy to hear the words and distracted. Behind his shoulder, the sun slanted low—it would be dark soon, and she wanted to be home before dark. Sometimes, when she entered the house, she had the feeling that she was entering a place that had just been filled with voices.

  9

  Emily had learned in the last few weeks that she enjoyed driving. In Columbus, it had been a chore to get from stoplight to stoplight, to dodge men in dirt-streaked jackets holding buckets and squeegies asking her for money for an unnecessary windshield cleaning. She had stopped once and given five dollars, which had made the man (who wore a bloodspotted, filthy bandage around his head) inexplicably angry.

  Is that all? He’d shouted into the car, the alcohol on his breath mixed with rot and sweat, the smell of the street. It made her feel guilty to drive down those streets, angry that the cars in front of her wouldn’t move faster, angry at the stoplights that kept them all from barrelling through the street, angry at the people who weaved between cars, angry at the stolen grocery carts full of aluminum cans that sometimes stood in the tiny parking spots where homeless men and women rooted in the university trash barrels, angry at being angry at people who could find no other way to keep themselves fed, angry that she had been reduced to fear and self-loathing and loathing for those who got in the way as she drove to places she didn’t really want to go anyway.

  Here, she could drive for miles without encountering a streetlight or a stop sign. The highways here were beautiful, particularly these sparsely-used highways, long stretches of pavement between towns that truckers used to get to Texas from anywhere East and South. She passed enormous trucks hauling water and logs and Hostess snacks and bread and metal cars full of cattle that pressed their soft noses against the holes and sometimes their black, lashed eyes. She also saw trucks full of chickens, their dirty feathers sticking out from the cages, sending a cloud of dusty scat and feathers and stink behind them. She had the road to herself and she could drive ten miles above the speed limit. The official speed limit was 45, but nobody did 45 on this stretch of straight, empty road. She’d learned this in the first week, when she had been passed in a no-passing zone by car after car, some honking at her as she did the speed limit. There were no sidewalks, no pedestrians, and scarcely any houses—just trailers and one-story houses set far back from the road, the mailboxes heavy-headed above the ditches that marked the place between road and ground. Here, poverty was hidden, not like in the city, where it stretched out on the street or shouted in clothes with a real bodies and voices.

  In her early days of trying to find her way home from Keno, she’d found a back road lined with slumped trailers set far away from the road, most flanked by blackened burn-piles of trash, wrecked cars and trucks in various stages of disrepair, and beige laundry hanging on lines that extended from the edge of a trailer to the closest tree. She’d driven slowly past, trying to find her road again, and saw a woman emerge from the front door of one of the trailers with a bucket full of water. She made eye contact with Emily and, without changing her face to acknowledge the presence of a strange car, threw the contents of the bucket out into the yard. The bucket was sudsy, the water black, and it arced up with the force of her throw and beat against one of the cars without tires.

  On her way home from The Garden, Emily passed the Swap Shop, where Cheryl was surely inside, trying to keep herself upright until seven when the shop closed and she could go home to cook her children dinner and watch television or play games on Facebook, her favorite new activity, she’d told Emily. Now, whenever Emily checked her e-mail at the Keno library, she found her inbox full of e-mails asking for boards, nails, cows, flowers, gems, and other things that Emily did not understand or know how to give her, she so rarely checked her Facebook and never played games. Emily passed the Free Will Baptist Church, which was lit up. It was Wednesday night, another church night for the faithful. Then came Echo Lake, calm and black, its branches still, people in shadow lined along the piers and bridges, their poles cast into the flat water. She pushed the gas lightly as she grew closer to Wells road.

  When she turned the last sharp corner before home, past the last pier that jutted out into the water, Emily saw pieces
of rubble strewn along the road—a long, ragged strip of rubber torn from a tire, an unidentifiable piece of pipe covered in rust and dirt, and a pool of shattered glass. She slowed down. The objects gathered shape until she recognized a car lurched over so that its underside showed, belly-up in the late-afternoon sun. In the ditch and brush by the side of the road, water bottles, clothes, and discs of light that must have been cds spread out on the grass. The accident was just yards from the bait shop that boasted live crawlers and minnows. It was closed now, though, since it was past 6:30, the absolute latest that the old man that ran it kept the place open. Once, she’d went into the shop, curious, and found walls of fishing lures, each as elaborately strung and decorated as a designer earring. If you lifted the makeshift lids of grimy, plastic tubs that lined the wall near the check-out counter, you could see the minnows or crawlers inside, writhing in the murky water together. The man had watched her the entire time, suspicious. She didn’t visit again. There were no other houses on the road, not until past Wells road. She might be the only person to pass for the next five or ten minutes.

  Emily slowed and parked on the shoulder. An arm, white and unhurt, splayed out, the fingers lax. It was a woman’s hand. Dark brown hair covered the woman’s face. The hair was thick, tarry with blood, which had splattered on the bit of bare shoulder she could see. No, not a woman. A girl. The girl wore a sweet, summer dress, something in light, white fabric with sparse blue flowers. She was free of the car, unpinned, and so must have been flung from an open window or open door before the car had crashed. Emily picked through the grass, avoiding the plastic cups, smashed cd cases, and one women’s sandal, the thin strap snapped. The girl lay twisted, her right arm under her body, her left flung out and stretched upward in an angle that must have torn her shoulder’s hinge. Emily kneeled next to the woman. The whole scene smelled like something burning, and heat came from the car in waves. She touched the swell of the girl’s hip—she didn’t dare touch her head, afraid of that tarry blackness of hair. The girl’s hip was soft and she didn’t move or twinge when Emily pressed it. Her body seemed heavy on the ground. She was dead, she had to be, or something close to it—the puddle of blood beneath her and her hidden face, pavement down, almost assured it. Emily reached out and touched the pale hand, turning it over to reach the wrist. She put her fingers on the blue-veined pulse lines. She felt nothing moving, and the skin was damp and somewhat cool. Emily stood up, her stomach aching. She wanted very badly to run in the opposite direction of this woman, but her mind would not let her. She felt ashamed of the weakness in her knees. To distract herself, she felt her pockets for her phone, but then remembered that she’d left it at home. Since it hardly worked anywhere but in Keno, it had become a useless acecessory, good only for checking the time and setting a morning alarm.

  She saw the man when she walked around to the front of the car to survey the damage and get away from the girl. He sat against the vertical bumper, his head hanging down, his hands on his thighs. His legs were stuck out straight before him as though he’d been posed there, a rag doll with stiff knees. Emily thought at first that he, like the girl, had been flung back up against the car he’d been thrown from, somehow, and was dead. But she heard, faintly in the rising sound of crickets in the lakeside trees that clustered beyond the shoulder, that he was mumbling to himself. She knelt down as close to him as she dared—she was afraid of him, too, but didn’t understand why. She didn’t want to be the kind of person who ran from suffering. She knelt by the man and listened to his whispers. He was breathing normally.

  Hello, she said, and he looked up, revealing a wide, deep cut across his forehead. It streaked blood down his face from brow to chin.

  I didn’t mean it, he said, the blood sticky in his teeth. I didn’t mean it. I wanted to scare her.

  Do you need help? She asked, setting her hand down on the wet ground to balance. He shook his head and a new, thin line of blood came down from his forehead. He pressed his hands into fists and pushed them against his thighs. He didn’t meet her eye. I only meant to scare her. He looked at Emily carefully, his eyes narrowing. Do you know me? he asked. She shook her head. I’m not a bad person, he said. The kids love me. They love me like a father. I’m not a bad person. I tried to stop and help her, I tried, but I flipped the car and I’m afraid I...He stopped and began to rock back and forth, his hands flat on the ground to keep him from falling over. Emily stood.

  I’ll get an ambulance, she said, backing away from his rocking and the blood that now dripped from his forehead to his khaki pants, making big, sticky splotches of reddish-black on the fabric. Emily was backing away, trying not to see the girl on the ground, when a truck pulled up in front of the wreck, its big wheels grinding into the soft dirt of the ground.

  Are you all right? A man stepped from the car. His t-shirt was bright orange and had the name of a sports team on the front in black letters. It’s not me, she said, shaking her head and pointing. There’s a man here, he’s hurt. And a girl. I think she’s dead. At her words, the man leaning against the car began to wail in a low, broken voice.

  I don’t have my cell, she said. Can you call?

  They don’t work here, the man said. He peered down at the man leaned against the car, walked around the back, shook his head at the girl’s body, and came back around again.

  I’ll go call the police, the hospital, over at my house, she said. The man with the truck knelt down by the man with the cut in his forehead. The man with a cut moaned. They seemed to know each other: the man with the truck spoke low, familiar, like a father to a child. Emily could not make out what he said, but when he rose, he seemed unshaken.

  It’s fine now, the man said to her. I live just right over here. He gestured out to his left in an indeterminate direction. It’ll be quicker if I do it. Why don’t you just go on home?

  Are you sure?

  He stood up. Yes. It’s best if you go home. You don’t want to get in the way.

  This convinced her. She had always been afraid of getting in the way.

  After she came home and crawled into her bed with new sheets and blankets, her walls still smelling of paint, she wondered if she had done the wrong thing in leaving. Weren’t people who came upon accidents supposed to stay at the scene to tell what they had seen? Wasn’t she supposed to call somebody?

  She woke in the morning early, having forgotten to undress or brush her teeth before bed. Her mouth felt thick and dirty. Emily had expected a phone call, a knock on the door, something. She had not called the police. Wasn’t it illegal not to call? Emily found the thin yellow phone book that had materialized in her mailbox the week before, a faded picture of a stream on the cover. The county sheriff’s office phone rang three times before anyone picked up.

  I saw the accident yesterday, she told the operator, the one with the young girl and older man, over on Wells Road, around Echo Lake.

  The woman on the other end of the line seemed distracted. Emily thought she could hear chewing.

  Yes, operator finally said. So you saw the incident happen?

  No, I was there after, after everything happened.

  We’ll take your name and number, the woman said. If we need you, we’ll call.

  So I shouldn’t come down?

  Don’t bother, the woman said. Just come if you’re called. Emily nodded and gave her address and phone number.

  I don’t get my cell phone calls out here, she said, so it might be hard to get ahold of me that—

  It’s fine, the woman said. We’ll get you if we need you. And then she hung up.

  She spent the weekend after the accident cleaning, disinfectng every surface. When she was done, the house smelled as chemical as a hospital and bore no traces of tobacco and cabbage, which she had smelled faintly in the drapes and other porous surfaces of the house before. She had scrubbed the past away, and now all that was left of the past were the measurements in the doorframe, which would not come away without taking the paint with them.

&n
bsp; She dreamed about the girl in the accident. In her dreams, the girl turned her head. She wasn’t dead, but damaged beyond repair, her face bloodied and misshapen. I’m alive, she said to Emily, her broken arm flapping against the ground, held down by the snapped bone. Don’t just walk away.

  •

  Emily sometimes bought the weekly necessities that she inevitably ran out of—toilet paper, toothpaste, coffee, milk—from Jimmy’s store, where one roll of toilet paper cost three dollars and the coffee was dusty on the shelf, an off-brand vacuum-packed for freshness probably years ago. But it was better than driving all the way to Keno, and sometimes she’d drink too much wine to even contemplate the ride. Other people, too, shuffled in to buy things they’d forgotten in qualities and quantities less than what they otherwise would stand for: paper towels stained yellow with age, cans of beans with torn labels and bent sides for full price. She was in Jimmy’s when she saw Colleen.

  Colleen was reading the Heartshorne Gazette at the counter, holding the front page close to her face. On it was a photograph of the girl from the accident. Emily had seen it as soon as she came in. She hadn’t seen the girl’s face that day, but she knew it must be her: the black hair, narrow shoulders. It must have been the girl’s senior picture, since she wore her cheerleading outfit and smiled before a fake background of autumn leaves. She stood with her hands on her waist, one knee bent, her sneaker balanced on a basketball. Colleen turned, the paper in her hand, and saw Emily. Emily smiled and nodded.

  Hello, she said. How are you doing, Colleen? The woman’s eyes didn’t change, though her mouth crept slightly up at the edges.

  I’m Emily Collins, she said. Related to Fran, you remember? I live in her house now.

  The old woman continued to stare, clutching her paper tighter.

  We met at the church dinner? Emily said, smiling wider.

  Colleen finally nodded, closing her eyes. I know you, she said. I remember you from church. Did you see this? She pointed at the front page of the newspaper. Did you see what happened to this little girl? She held the newspaper so tightly that it wrinkled beneath her hands. She held the page up, inches from Emily’s face. The girl’s teeth were white and unbroken, her hair one black mass. Emily remembered how difficult it had been to tell her hair from the ground, both were so darkened with blood.