Echo Lake

by Letitia Trent

The party was at Keith’s, just across the lake. He lived in the woods, hadn’t even bothered to clear the trees around his trailer so he’d have a yard.The trees rushed up to the house, brushed against the windows when the wind blew. But there was a clear, wide path from the lake to his house, right through the woods, and she wasn’t worried about getting lost. She’d grown up here. The moon was full tonight and the lake reflected the moon back. She’d made the trek before, sometimes several times a week, back when they’d been seeing each other. It had been a short, mostly sweet time, though she’d never had any intention of making the relationship permanent. He rarely had a job and spent most of his money on weed and pirated DVD’s from Rod’s Swap Shop. Still, he was affectionate and had a kind of sloppy, catholic kindness that she’d needed at the time. That’s why she still went to his parties, still hugged him when they met at the grocery store, and hoped that someday his brain would catch up with his age and make him worthy of trying again.

  Lillian’s heels stuck in the mud as she skirted close to the lake, near where the ledge above the water sloped down into a small, rocky beach. It was hot out, almost as hot as it had been during the day—the weather reporter had said highs up to 99. Lillian tried to stay inside as much as possible during the daytime in July and August, when the heat was sometimes so strong it could make her sick just to be in it. She had air conditioners thrumming in each room of the trailer, keeping the indoors so cold her fingers seized up—but that was better than the alternative. Once, she’d seen some woman on one of those morning shows talk about how air conditioning was one of the biggest contributors to global warming, energy usage, oil usage—pretty much everything bad in the world. Below her name on the screen, it said “Director of Vermont Environmental Solutions.” Lillian had turned the television off then. A woman from Vermont telling her about the evils of air conditioning was like a eunuch giving sex tips.

  Though the sun was gone, it had left its heat behind, sticky and heavy in the air. Being near the lake didn’t help. It held the warmth and beamed it back out, damp and sticky like the spray from a humidifier.

  She wiped her palms on her skirt. She felt sticky everywhere, in the crooks of her elbows, her armpits, the backs of her knees, the strip of underwear elastic that branded her skin. She stopped and took another sip of Aftershock.

  The moon streaked the surface of the water with light. Across the water, a line of trees blocked the horizon. They bloomed crazily and dropped their green leaves into muck below. The opposite bank angled in close to her bank, creating the shortest point across the lake, a shallow, muddy corridor of water with a footbridge across it. That was the way to Keith’s house.

  Lillian stopped and watched the moon on the water, the ripples of light that moved sluggishly with the small tides. How did a lake have ripples and tides? Wasn’t it just standing water, a big pond? She continued to sip the Aftershock. The light on the water moved in zig-zag patterns. The air smelled different here, different than she’d remembered: not quite sweet, but something like sweetness. Lillian dug at the bug bites on her ankles and closed her eyes, breathing in deep: it smelled like grass, torn petals, a little bit like bad weed, and sweat.

  Lillian touched her throat as something trickled down it and into the gap between her breasts—sweat. She was hardly halfway there, and already she was dripping, covered in bug bites, half drunk, and exhausted.

  The walk to Keith’s seemed, now, after a quarter of a bottle of aftershock, after the heat and the bug-bites, to be more trouble than it had been worth. Lillian sat down amongst the dry rocks on the shore. She’d sit out here and drink a while, calm her nerves, and then go home and put on the radio. The classic country station took requests on Friday nights. She’d call in and ask for Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors. She’d probably be in bed before midnight.

  She had only wanted to go out in hopes that somebody new would be there, somebody she hadn’t met before or slept with before or smoked weed with before, somebody, man or woman, who might have something new to say. But there probably wouldn’t be anyone new. Maybe one of Keith’s many cousins from the next county over, each with worse teeth than the next. Nobody like the person she hoped for. Even hoping seemed like more effort than it was worth.

  There was nothing new in Heartshorne. Everything ran on a loop. Her mother had raised her alone (most of the time—her father was there, but in and out) in a little house near Echo Lake (the other side) and now she raised her own children alone in a trailer near Echo Lake. Shelly and Dustin would work their way through Heartshorne Elementary and Heartshorne High School, doing average, as she had, and they’d be spit out into her life again, fifteen years later. The only difference would be technology: maybe they’d have fucking hover cars or flying shoes or something that wouldn’t change much of anything except the speed at which they moved toward the same life as always.

  She threw a rock out into the water and it rippled out and out, the light moving with it. She didn’t like these moods. They were pointless, what her mother called “dwelling” or “moping.”

  It was beautiful just to look at the water. A greenish mist rose from it, carrying that peculiar smell. Strange she hadn’t noticed it much before. She’d heard stories about Echo Lake’s special mist, particularly during her childhood, when her mother hadn’t let her swim outside in the dark.

  God knows what’s out there, she’d said.

  Lillian’s hearing sharpened in the dark and she thought she heard the keening cry of something caught in teeth or a trap—a rabbit, maybe, or a squirrel treed by a cat. She’d seen that once, a cat waiting, still, its tail twitching, as a squirrel stood on a tree branch screaming down at it. The cat had only stared at the squirrel’s dramatics, neither interested nor surprised, merely waiting for the squirrel to tire itself out and try to come down again.

  The warmth of the cinnamon liquor seeped through her body. She breathed in deeply, the smell of the lake seeming sweeter as she drank, sweeter as she breathed it in. A fog rolled up from the surface. Her head buzzed slightly, a small ache that wasn’t altogether unpleasant, like the buzz of an electrical current.

  Lillian undid the buckles of her shoes and slipped them off. They seemed silly, those thin-soled things, the heel stabbing into the ground each time she walked, the strips of leather too thin to really protect her from falling or losing the shoes from her feet. All of her clothes seemed silly, come to think of it—these swaths of fabric covering up body parts that everyone had. And it was so hot!

  She unbuttoned her blouse and threw it on the water. The water took it away slowly and the moon illuminated its wrinkles. Her skirt was made of denser stuff and didn’t reflect light. It ate the moonlight and eventually sank.

  Lillian unpeeled her underclothes and lay down on the rocks. They bit into her back, but she didn’t mind the feeling. She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds from the woods behind her and across the water, the bugs pulsing and unseen animals picking their way through the burnt grasses and leaves that were unfortunate enough to fall from the trees.

  But she was still too hot. Her skin itched.

  The Aftershock bottle lay on its side, the sticky red liquid dripping out. She’d left it opened. At the bottom, the rock-candy gathered in crystals.

  Lillian smashed the bottle against a large, flat rock until it cracked. A sliver of glass flew out and knicked her stomach (she felt the blood, the slight itch of the glass). Now, the candy was exposed, glittering. She reached in, trying to avoid the glass, and picked out a marble-sized piece of candy. As she sucked on the candy, cracking it between her teeth, she noticed a long, slick black trail of liquid dripping from her fingers, into the well of her palm.

  She had cut her wrist on the glass. The wound was wide and blood spilled from it, as if she had slid the bottom of a milk jug with a razor. She could barely feel it. She could only feel the heat and tickle of the blood.

  It was beautiful, though. The moon was directly above her like an enormous flashlight. The
blood reminded her of the moon on the water, of her shirt illuminated in the light, of how beautiful it had been to allow the current to take her clothes away. She took a shard of glass from between the rocks and moved tip of the arrow-shaped glass along the surface of her opposite inner arm, along the white skin. A thin black line emerged and then erupted, spilling its own widening lines down her arm. She began to feel light, closer to the moon than to the dirt or the water, that great breathing thing that had carried her clothes out into itself. As if it had heard her, a gust of air pushed the fog from where it hung over the water and into her face. She breathed it in, tasiting salt and rust and muck.

  Her arm was a collection of thinning black lines. She held it up, trying not to smudge. She took the triangle of glass in her free hand (it shook now—she’d have to lie down soon, to sleep it off) and slid it from her inner thigh all the way down to the knee. That swipe bled too quickly to be worth much, at least aesthetically. It made a sheet of blood, no intricate design.

  She could barely hold her head up. She’d have to work quickly. She stood up and tilted her head back. The sky was lit, the moon huge and suspended directly above her, big as a clean Christmas plate. The glass slid smoothly across her skin and she felt a tingle and sting when her skin broke. It hurt at the endges of the cut and she let her chin snap back down so she could watch the lines collect and run down her chest, skirt around her breasts, and drip down her stomach.

  She was tired. She pitched the shard of glass into the water and lowered herself down to her knees and lay face down on the ground. Her legs and arms ached now where she had cut them. She was almost asleep when she heard the shrill song coming from her tangle of shoes and underwear. It was her phone. She had forgotten all about the children for a while, but she remembered them now.

  Lillian tried to push herself up by her arms, her palms dipping deep into the dirt, but her whole body was leaden, so tired, and it would not move.

  She couldn’t remember how she had gotten here. She was wet—had she gone swimming in the lake? She hoped not. It was notoriously dirty and children cut their feet on the bottom, which was filled with beer bottles and car parts.

  She tried to open her mouth, but no sound came out. Her throat felt hot and throbbing and she wanted to touch it but her hands wouldn’t listen.

  She closed her eyes and hoped that before the children woke, somebody would find her and help her to her own bed. She hoped that her absence wouldn’t make them afraid as she had been, curled at the bottom of her parent’s bed, holding herself tight and certain that she was the only one left, that she was alone and that their stories and songs soothing her to sleep had meant nothing at all.

  14

  Emily slept through the night without visits from her mother or dreams of travel. Jonathan didn’t pull away the covers or crowd her. He slept in a self-contained ball, warm and complete and turned away from her. Not unfriendly, but enough for himself, needing no heat from her. When they woke, almost at the same time, he touched her hair and said he was hungry and that he was sorry that he had to leave so soon.

  I have to open the shop on time, he said. Most of our customers are early-morning people. They ate cereal in her kitchen. It was the first time that somebody else had eaten with her in the new house, the first time somebody had spent the night.

  She asked him if she had snored, if the house had kept him awake (as if the house itself were particularly loud or difficult to sleep in).

  Emily watched his face for signs of lying as he said no, that he’d slept well. She felt panic, which tasted like tin and felt like buzzing in her teeth, as he prepared to leave. He found his clothes and kissed her goodbye. I had a very, very, good time, he said, pressing his forehead against hers. I’ll give you a call tonight, okay? He said. She nodded and waved on the front step as he left, feeling silly for doing something so cliche, something that probably made him laugh as he viewed her in his rearview mirror.

  When she stepped back inside the house, she got on her knees, pushed aside two days of mail collected from the mail slot, and lowered herself to floor. She began to cry in ugly waves.

  Her body surprised her. She was afraid—her stomach hurt, her eyes ached from behind, as they did when she was particularly tired. But what was she afraid of? That he wouldn’t come back and she’d be left in this house like Frannie until she died of old age, or was killed? That somebody would find her dead after a week, maybe, her throat cut and one bowl of instant soup cooling and thickening on the kitchen table, and that nobody would really care?

  He was kind. He said he’d had a good time. Why do I expect it to fail?

  She hardly knew him. He knew so much about her. It made her nervous to be at a disadvantage. And she was letting him too close, too quickly. It was a bad idea, all of it.

  When she was done crying, she rose and wiped her face clean. At least she knew exactly why she was upset. So often, in the past, she hadn’t. She would cry for hours and Eric would come to her asking if he could help, asking if it was his fault, and she honestly could not answer. But knowing helped: she knew what to do. She put on a pot of tea. She went to the bedroom as it warmed and made her bed, smoothing away the imprint of Jonathan. It was only the trace of his body that made her act like this, the inevitable feeling of connection and fear of that connection being severed that came from sharing certain parts of one’s body with others. She’d learned this in college, in biology class, and so the knowledge had stuck with her as fact, as yet another sad example of how little humans really could control who they loved, for how long, or why.

  If he didn’t come back, she would be fine. She ran downstairs when the kettle screamed and made herself a cup of tea.

  Emily fished the folder full of photocopied articles about her mother’s disappearance from her bag. She decided that she wouldn’t think of him, that if he didn’t decide to come back or call again, she would go back to her work of finding out about her family. Maybe it would even be easier without him. She wouldn’t be so distracted. She wouldn’t have to clean or hide the wine bottles. She’d have time to put herself together properly before she met somebody, a real somebody who would not sleep over and then leave quickly, as if to get away before anyone was awake to see him. She wouldn’t be suprised if he didn’t call or if he called with one of those messages full of throat clearing and apology, something about her neediness and her Tower and how he just wasn’t ready. Though, he probably wouldn’t have to resort to that kind of behavior. There was something cool in his self-possession. He would be able to say, simply, that it just wasn’t going to work out. She had been such a burden to him already, all of the microfilm spools and the photocopying in a dusty room, and she had cried last night at dinner—actually cried so much her face turned red, her eyes swelled, and her stomach felt empty thought it was full of cheap wine.

  She shook her head and spread out the newspaper clippings before her. They were scant, but they at least gave her an area of investigation, a particular place to look. It was nearby, where Connie had been finally found, within sight of Rod’s Swap Shop, not far from where Echo Lake ended. She’d gone missing outside of the school. It was down a road that Emily hadn’t visited yet that led to one of the few scenic outlooks in Oklahoma, one of the only places where you could stand above anyplace else and see swaths of green below. She hadn’t seen the mountains yet, though they mounded gently on the horizon when she drove from Keno. The articles mentioned the people who had seen Connie last (she imagined her mother as Connie now, even in her thoughts, she was so far from being her mother yet at this age): Mrs. Hanson, the English teacher, and a few names of people who were surely so old that they were dead by now. No Colleens. Still, she’d have to ask Colleen. She’d have to figure out why her family had been wild.

  She washed the used cups and cleaned the kitchen until there was nothing left to clean. Even the dirt that collected between the metal sink and the countertop had been bleached away. She’d have to start now. Not with Colleen, Emily
wasn’t ready for somebody so unfriendly yet, but somebody she knew. She’d talk to Levi. He had to know more, have some memory of this event that, if the papers told any truth, had been an enormous shock to the community. But first, she had to go to the high school.

  •

  Heartshorne High School was made of stone and mortar, the rocks varying between black, brown, and the orange clay of the dirt roads Emily had crossed to reach it. A wide, stone staircase led up to the glass doors at the entrance. It was a Sunday, no school, though there were a few cars in the school’s gravel driveway.

  Her mother had walked here almost every morning, had run down these steps to get home. Emily touched the metal plaque at the entrance of the school. It had been built in 1910, just five years after the town was established. She walked up the steps and when she reached the top, turned and leaned her back against the glass. Her mother had stood in this spot the day she had disappeared. She had come down the steps. Emily stepped down each deliberately, imagining herself as her mother forty years before. She tried to imagine herself in white stockings, a skirt made of heavy polyester, a blouse buttoned up to her chin, a bra full of wires and cones and fasteners. Her mother had worn her hair curled, though her hair, like Emily’s, was aggressively straight and flat. Connie had talked about sleeping in curlers and how sick hairspray made her, how she woke each morning with a headache and hair that smelled clean and poisonous and moved like a collection of soft springs. Emily imaged her hair bouncing, the smell of hairspray faint, her clothes buttoned and tucked and made of heavy fabrics. Even in her later years, her mother hated how women let themselves go, how they wore sweatpants outdoors and couldn’t even be bothered to put on lipstick even when they looked like death. Emily imagined herself in her mother’s body, a small, constricted body, hot under her clothes but used to being so. She imagined that peculiar smell of sweat on polyester, reminiscent of burning rubber.