Echo Lake

by Letitia Trent

  It’s probably not good, Jonathan said, glancing up at her. He was examining the laminated menu, sticky with fingerprints and the steam and grease of other people’s meals. The habit of eating with other people, people you didn’t know, eating food prepared by somebody you had never met, seemed suddenly a strange gesture of trust to Emily. Who knew who any of these people were? And other people had recently sat in the same seats, licked the same forks and knives, scraped the same plates. What a strange custom, she thought. She was in a certain mood, one in which she saw herself from a distance, the entire scene from a distance, and fully felt the overwhelming strangeness of everyday human life, as an alien might.

  It’s strange we eat with people we don’t know, she said out loud. She took another sip and winced at the bitter taste.

  I actually know some of these people, Jonathan said, by sight, anyway. He responded as though she hadn’t said something even slightly strange, and she liked him for it.

  My high school science teacher is back there in a booth, Jonathan said, his beard full of soup, his wife across from him wearing the same blue make-up she did at basketball games and year-end assemblies ten years ago.

  But I don’t know them, she said. I don’t know anyone here, except you. She sipped again.

  And the people at the church, she said. I know them. She imagined Colleen, shaking her dry hands, her knowledge of Emily’s family longer and so much deeper than Emily’s own. The waiter came to take their order. He was older than most waiters she’d seen in Heartshorne, not the usual high-schooler or career waitress, women who all looked tired, haggard, but full of sourceless energy, zipping from table to kitchen to table. The waiter had memorized the specials and did not write down what they asked for. His smooth, dark hair did not move when he spoke or bent to remove the menus from their hands. He was a perfect servant.

  It feels wrong to be here now, she said, swirling the wine in her cup, trying to extract something besides the smell of fruit and alcohol. She felt irritable with Jonathan for taking her here and irritable with herself for being so ungrateful.

  Why? Jonathan asked, looking at her, smiling slightly. He looked nervous, she thought. Afraid she might say something stupid or crazy.

  I’m not drunk, she said, pushing the glass away. If that’s what you think.

  I didn’t say you were.

  But you think I am. She wanted to cry. And then she was crying: not sobbing, but leaking uncontrollably, her body working against her again.

  I’m sorry, she said, spilling the heavy silverware from the folded napkin. It was made of slippery polyester and didn’t soak up her tears: they slid along the surface, shaming her with their wetness. She was crying in a restaurant on what was technically her first date, a date that had taken place largely in the periodical room of the library. She could not make herself stop.

  Jonathan leaned across the table. Are you upset about your mother? He asked. About what we learned today?

  I saw that girl who died, she blurted out. The one who died last weekend in that accident in Heartshorne. She was on the road, twisted back, her face down. I didn’t see her face. But I saw her body.

  She released it all now, not caring if the people around them heard. They craned their necks, staring at her, but eventually turned back around, their manners winning out over their curiosity.

  She allowed him to scoot his seat next to hers and take one of her hands, though she saved the other for her napkin. Crying was bad, but public crying was even worse. She allowed the idea of another date to leave her head immediately. She imagined going home and never seeing him again. And then, with this eventuality in mind, once she had accepted the inevitability of it, she could speak.

  I don’t know how to understand what I saw, she told him. I keep thinking about her. I see her turning on the ground, her face turned to me, ground away by the pavement. I can’t make it stop.

  He picked up her hand and held it against his chest, a curious gesture that surprised her so that she pulled away slightly out of instinct. He did not let go.

  I’m sorry you had to see that, He said. You can talk about it as much as you need to.

  And my mother, too, Emily said. She couldn’t make herself stop talking. It’s not just the girl. My mother never told me anything about this. Never said she’d gone missing as a teenager. I never had a clue. Why would she keep something so big from me?

  Emily touched the folder she had placed on the table by her plate: thirty pages of articles about her mother’s dissapearance and the six months after her return. The last article said nothing except that the case was still a mystery: Constance Collins claimed that she remembered nothing about that weekend, and nobody had come forward to provide further information.

  Why wouldn’t she tell me? Why didn’t she want me to know?

  Maybe she really remembered nothing, he said. Maybe there wasn’t anything to tell.

  If she didn’t remember anything she would have told me this funny thing happened and she didn’t remember any of it. That would be something worth telling. I’m sure she remembered. I’m sure she never forgot. Maybe that’s why she hated it here. Something happened to her, and she never wanted me to know. But why?

  The Tower, Jonathan said. It’s a Tower, she can’t just go telling everybody. Maybe she was trying to protect you. It must have been very heavy for her to carry.

  Emily nodded, but said nothing. She could not contemplate her mother’s sadness right now. It was enough to hold her own.

  I get them both mixed up in my head, she said. The girl’s death. My mother’s disappearance. And then her death, which I didn’t see in person at all: I only saw her barely alive and then, later, I saw her coffin lowered into the ground, a closed-coffin funeral. I didn’t ask to see her before the funeral. She wouldn’t have wanted me to. I respected her privacy, even then.

  I’m sorry to burden you with this, she said. You are very kind to listen.

  It’s okay, he said, waving away her apology. I’d want somebody to listen to me if I had just learned something like this. How about this, he said. He took her free hand in two of his. He pressed her hand hard between them. We finish our food here and then you come over to my house for drinks.

  Emily wiped underneath her eyes with the napkin. How about you come to mine, she said. I need to have somebody else in the house, she said, surprising herself. It’s just been me. And Levi, the pastor. And Fran, of course. That’s the problem.

  He nodded. Of course. I’d be happy. We’ll pick up some better wine on the way.

  He released her hand and Emily ate her food without tasting it. Her tears had dried and now her cheeks were hot—she had asked him over to her house. She imagined the tangles of socks and underwear in the living room, where she often dressed and undressed while listening to the news on her tiny radio because its sound didn’t reach upstairs. There was probably ample evidence of her unhealthy habits: empty bottles with dried bits of red wine caked in the bottom, empty packets of instant breakfast, an ashtray with a few smashed butts.

  She tried to concentrate on her food, though the bland pasta sauce couldn’t hold her attention. She saw her mother as she was in her junior high school picture, poised and cone-breasted, her hair stiff. Her mother had wandered away in the dark and had come back three days later with bruises and scratches on her arms and legs and her face, had come back close-mouthed and angry until the day she’d died. Emily had not seen the exact moment of that death—she’d been called home during the night, her mother had died sometime between nurse checks, hours before dawn.

  Before her death, after the first round of chemotherapy hadn’t worked, after she’d lost her hair and could hardly eat, her stomach rejected everything she gave it, she had told Emily that she wished they would just stop trying to save her.

  Why don’t they just let me die? she’d asked, her bald head covered with a scarf in cheerful cherry print, a scarf that had seemed ridiculous and even offensive to Emily at the time. Who had given
it to her? A nurse? A nurse who didn’t know that her mother hated cherries and had always plucked them from sundaes before she ate them? They taste too much like candy, too sweet, too fake, she’d said. She’d seemed proud of the scarf, though, and never said anything about where she’d gotten it.

  But when the doctors had suggested radiation, Connie had agreed.

  You can tell them to stop at any time, Emily had told her. You can tell them to stop and we’ll stop.

  You tell them to stop, Connie had said, turning her eyes, the most live, liquid part of her, those globes that stood out from her face, big as mirrors.

  I can’t do that.

  It was harder than Connie had imagined to just give up and let herself die, even if she wanted to.

  I’ll see you next Christmas, Emily would say each time she left for home again after the holidays.

  If I’m even alive then, Connie would invariably answer. Emily had never believed this. Her mother had seemed incapable of dying.

  Connie was buried in a plot that she’d chosen, a small place at the back of a graveyard in the Maine town where she’d lived the last seven years of her life. The graveyard was curiously hilly, so old that some headstones were made of thin slate, the names and images carved in by hand. Some tipped sideways, falling down the hill. Her mother was buried on a flat, grassy spot, surrounded by gravestones decorated with plastic American flags. Emily remembered being confused by this burst of patriotism until she realized that it was memorial day. Even the long dead in the graveyard, those dead from the Revolutionary war or Civil War, had flags. Somebody had remembered them.

  •

  She thought of her mother as she sat in the passenger seat. Jonathan drove her home: she had drunk another glass of wine at the restaurant and her head swam. She imagined her mother on the side of the road as they passed Jonathan’s shop and grew closer to Heartshorne, her mother with her thumb out, her hair out of those meticulous configurations of pins and barrettes. The trees gathered close. They thickened as the sun fell. It would be easy to get lost here, easy to be knocked on the head and forget where you’d been or what you had done or what someone else had done to you. Maybe it wasn’t so unlikely that she didn’t remember.

  Emily watched Jonathan drive, watched the lights from approaching cars stripe across his face. She hadn’t learned anything new about him today. It had been all about her, her Tower.

  I’m sorry this has all been about me, she said. I’m sorry I made you sit in a library and look through microfilm. I want to ask you something about yourself, ok?

  Shoot.

  What’s your favorite book?

  You’ll laugh. The Hobbit. And my better answer is Catch-22. I haven’t read much since I was a teenager, though. Not much time anymore. I mostly read graphic novels now.

  What’s your favorite album?

  The Velvet Underground and Nico.

  Favorite comic book character?

  Batman. He didn’t have any superpowers. He just made a kickass suit. That’s talent, not luck.

  He had money, too, she said. Don’t forget that.

  Yeah, he said, but all the money in the world can’t make you a superhero. Otherwise, Paris Hilton would be one. Johnny Depp would be one. It takes smarts.

  True. Thanks, she said. I’ll have more questions, eventually, but for now, that’s good enough.

  That’s all you need to know? Those are the most important questions you can think to ask?

  She shrugged. They’re the first ones that came to mind.

  Hmm, he said. I’m not sure what that says about you.

  It was easy to talk to him. She was sad that he’d probably never come back, but she pushed that to the back of her mind. She would enjoy now. That’s all she had anyway.

  I have a theory about superheroes, by the way, she said. People who love Superman idealize the world too much, they are too innocent. People who love Spiderman are eccentric but basically normal. People who like Batman are the best, though: they understand gray areas and can take the darkness, but they still try to do what’s right.

  I like that theory, he said. Who’s your favorite?

  She shook her head. I don’t like any of them, she said. Superheroes are like cheating.

  When she brought him inside, she found the house cleaner than she had thought; no stray clothes on the floor or bottles on the counter. Her cigarettes were in the kitchen drawer, the ashtray cleaned out and only a faint smell of ashes lingered by the kitchen trash.

  This is all mine, she said, holding out her arms to indicate bounty, ironically. My family inheritance. Everything I have left under the Collins name.

  Jonathan walked through the house, touching the walls. He found the penciled notches in the hallway. Look, he said. Somebody measured a child here.

  Emily shook her head. Frannie didn’t have children.

  It could have been her neices, nephews. Maybe your mother. He ran his finger up and down the marks. It’s beautiful—I wish everybody did this, kept a record like this of somebody growing.

  The wine made her clumsy, so when she reached out to touch his back she caught his elbow instead. She held it.

  I like listening to you talk, she said. Because you only talk when you have something to say.

  13

  Lillian put the children to bed, pulled the blankets up to their shoulders, and kissed them. She stood outside the door until she heard them snoring, heard them lay still, not restless and kicking as they were on nights when they wouldn’t go to bed and whined to have drinks of water or to stay up late and walked in, crying, red-cheeked, when she’d sat up late smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio. But they were good that night, tired out from playing in the woods all day. She’d helped them build a playhouse with old sheets and furniture—had cleared out a circle, raked up the leaves, scared away the snakes—and they had played there all afternoon, pretending to have a house of their own.

  It was funny that kids played house like adults. They must think it’s fun, paying bills and making dinner and cleaning, Lillian thought. Did it seem fun? Shelly had sounded just like an angry wife when she’d called Dennis in for make-believe dinner. Get over here, she’d said, before it I throw the whole thing out into the woods.

  Where had she learned that? Lillian hadn’t lived with a man for years. It wasn’t worth the trouble to let them move in, not until she found one worth sharing space with. But she was beginning to grow used to having her own space now, used to the way that she could leave her clothes out and take up the whole bed without anyone else there to pull the blankets off or kick her toward the edge. Maybe she’d never live with another man again. The thought both saddened and relieved her.

  When she heard their snores she went to the bedroom, slipped out of her pajamas, and put on her skirt and her sandals with straps that wrapped around her ankles. If the kids knew she was leaving, they’d whine and cry, they’d make it impossible for her to go anywhere. She did not feel guilty for fooling them. Parents were allowed to fool their children. It was one of the benefits of parenthood. She took the bottle of Aftershock from the fridge and put it in her purse. She wanted the small purse with the snap-top, the one covered in beads that could fit right into her hand, but she had to take the big purse covered in buckles—it was the only one that could fit the bulky, square bottle. Better she brought her own drink—otherwise she’d be stuck drinking Old English or that rose wine that came in jugs and tasted like old cough syrup. She put the cell phone in her pocket—she’d set it to ring at one so she’d be on her way out by then in case the kids woke up and were scared to find her gone. She never wanted them to wake without her in the house.

  When she was five years old, Lillian had woken up in the middle of night with one of those sudden, acute fevers that children get, sicknesses that last for days and leave them limp and damp. She woke and cried from the confusion of being both suffocatingly hot and chilled. She’d crawled down from her bed, the house dark and silent around her, not even
the dogs barking, and pushed open the bedroom door to her parent’s room to find an empty bed, the blankets twisted, the closet thrown open and her mother’s clothes crumpled on the floor.

  She’d seen this before on television—a messy room (“ransacked”, the man on America’s Most Wanted always said), the drawers emptied and furniture overturned. Next, she’d find bodies somewhere, she knew from those shows, people dead or dying from gunshots. Her parents loved true crime TV, each case re-told in slow motion, the action drained of color to indicate a fictional account of real events.

  So her parents were dead, she had reasoned, and the certainty paralyzed her. She had lain down on the floor at the base of her parent’s bed and curled into a ball with her arms around her knees and her bare feet tucked under the hem of her nightgown. Her parents had found her there an hour later, returned from a party, her mother in glittery eyeshadow and her sandals with straps that bit into the skin of her feet. When Lillian saw them, she began to weep with relief, crying so hard that she threw up on the carpet.

  Lillian didn’t want the children to ever have to imagine what they’d do if she was gone, if she were dead.

  But they were asleep, fast asleep, and when they were tired and snoring, almost nothing could wake them. Lillian took the Aftershock from her purse and swallowed a mouthful. It tasted like sugar on fire.