Echo Lake

by Letitia Trent

  Emily woke feeling dirty, her face sticky from the press of her arms against her cheek, her hair matted against her head, her whole body hot in the sunlight and the itchy polyester of the couch.

  She tried not to think of how her mother had been in those last months. Emily had not visited as frequently as she would’ve liked, not until the end, but still, she had too many memories of Connie’s decline, of her scalp showing through the thin hair and her anger at her body and her final inability to even be angry anymore, which had frightened Emily more than anything: anger was the current that ran through her mother’s personality. Anger made Connie go right back into the elementary school when Emily was in fifth grade and had come home with a bruised eye and demand that the teachers find out who had done this to her little girl. Anger made her lock a sixteen-year-old Emily outside during a January winter when she had broken curfew. Anger made her move from town to town, job to job, unsatisfied with herself and the people who she said stood in the way of her happiness.

  When the anger was gone, there didn’t seem to be anything left. She asked for the television turned on and her pills and her juice and she could hardly keep her eyes open when Emily was in the room and instead dozed fitfully.

  She had not died like people on television or in movies, people who suddenly became oracles or started to live their lives to the fullest just as life was being permanently taken from them. She didn’t exhort Emily to do something that would make her happy. She didn’t make proclamations of her love. She died as bitterly as she had lived in her last years, seeing this as nothing but more bad luck.

  Maybe, in those last moments, when only the nurse was there, she’d made a reversal, had wished to give some message to her only daughter. But it was too late, by then. She hadn’t earned a loving daughter to sit by her side and so the moment had been lost, if it had existed at all.

  So, Emily didn’t think of that time if she could help it. There wasn’t much of a reason, there were so few reminders: no family, few pictures. For years, she’d practiced forgetting. She’d made her mother’s death a numb space in her head: she imagined it as a spot on her brain that she could press her fingers and nails into and get no reaction at all.

  The dream had brought it back—how slow her illness seemed (and how often Emily had wished it could finally be over), and then how quick it seemed when she was finally gone, having dreamed her way into a coma during the night and then dead the next, slipping out of the world as tracelessly as she had left towns and rental houses and post office boxes and people who had disappointed her.

  •

  Emily let her shower water heat up until it was almost unbearable and stepped under the spray until she couldn’t stand it and let the cold back in. She scrubbed her hair hard with the pads of her fingers as her mother had when she was a child and had gotten sticky and dirty from playing outside all day in the summer. She stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, washing the sweat from her hair and skin, letting the thoughts of her mother go.

  She rubbed away a circle of fog from the mirror. She saw her own face, red and puffy, bearing the same creases from nose to mouth, the same slightly dented chin, the same hair that naturally split in a perfectly middle part, as her mother’s had.

  When her mother was thirty, she’d had a six-year-old daughter. She had been alone in West Virginia, learning how to cut hair during the day and waiting tables at night after Emily went to sleep. By all accounts, Connie had, at the very least, a real life: a child, a job, and, always, the thought that soon, when she got the money or time or found exactly the right thing, she would finally be who she was supposed to be.

  I don’t have that, Emily thought. I’m not real. Emily had nothing to anchor her in any place, nobody to be responsible for, no reason for waking up and nowhere to go when she did wake up. Connie at least had that. She had something to care for aside from herself. She couldn’t just drift. She had to establish herself quickly, find a place to live, shoes, a place for her child to go to school. And she always had.

  This is going to be our year, Connie would say, just after they moved in to a new home or she started a new project, forgetting that each time she’d said this before, she’d been wrong.

  Maybe, Emily thought, she would have been suited to my life better than I am. She wanted to be untethered. She would have used her time for something useful—she could have perfected something, become an expert, like she always wanted to be. She could easily imagine her mother as an artist, a scientist, a writer—somebody who did something solitary for hours at a time, enjoying every precious moment of absolute silence.

  Emily thought of all of the projects she had dropped when they became too difficult, all of the books she’d quit reading halfway through. Connie, though, would have flourished with the time and solitude that Emily had squandered, most nights watching reality television on the small screen of her laptop.

  Emily imagined her mother as a thirteen-year-old, so frightened of something that she could not, or would not, tell where she had been or what had happened to her for three days. This seemed like her, the more Emily thought of it. She was not the kind of person to tell, to let other people in. She prided herself in being able to take care of her own business. Maybe she had always been like that, always with a spine so stiff that it made it almost impossible for her to bend.

  Emily tried to remember herself as a child. She remembered eating ice cream on various front steps, the feeling of being pushed from behind on a swing, the feeling of her stomach sinking when the bus pulled up, full of kids she didn’t know that she’d have to figure out exactly how to sit with. Had she always been this shapeless, spineless thing?

  Emily looked at herself, at her no-longer-young face, never beautiful. What else did she have to do with this squandered life? She would agree to dig up the graves, as her mother had told her. She would stir things up. She would not leave.

  7

  Connie didn’t speak or kick or scream. She knew it was pointless, all for show, and that it might get her hurt worse than she might already be hurt. She let James lead her back to the group of men who still stood around the still-unopened cash register, most of them now smoking cigarettes. They were afraid. When James came back, they looked from her to James then back down at the ground. They wanted to speak, she could tell, but something had terrified them. Could it possibly be James, this wiry, skinny boy? He held her tightly and she could feel the bruises forming on her arms. Shit, one said, throwing his cigarette down and crushing it under his heel. What are we gonna do with her, Jimmy?

  James’ voice was close to her ear. She felt his breath, which was smoky and smelled of liquor.

  You let me worry about that. He jerked his head down toward the dented cash register. I’ll take the register and I’ll take the girl. You all didn’t see anything, okay? John, you left as usual, locked up tight. You didn’t notice anything strange.

  John nodded.

  The rest of you were somewhere else—fishing, like you told your mothers or your girlfriends or whoever you explain yourselves to.

  And her? The one who had asked first, the one who would meet her eyes, he pointed to her without looking in her direction. What are you going to do with her?

  James pressed her arm hard, pulling her towards him.

  She won’t be hurt, he said, though that’s not what had been asked, Connie noticed, and she knew that he had it in his power to hurt her. Nobody knew where she was—she was supposed to be at school, doing an after-school activity for the yearbook, that’s what she’d told her parents. Only Billy knew she was supposed to be somewhere else. He was waiting for her and probably thought she was just late, dawdling. And soon he would leave, thinking she had chickened out and didn’t really care for him. He probably wouldn’t tell, if asked, where he’d been and where she would be, out of embarrassment.

  It was supposed to be their first official date.

  She won’t be hurt if she does what I say, James said, pressing his fingerpad
s into the sore spots on her arm again.

  8

  Emily unfolded the newspaper and saw Rodriguez on the front page, his school picture featuring a smiling, shaven, professional man, hairline slightly receeding, looking nothing like the man that would later be found with a dead teenager thrown from his car.

  Local Man’s Death Ends Tragic Story

  Charles Rodriguez, 39, a former teacher at Heartshorne High School and suspect in the death of Jenny Willis, was found dead on the shore of Lake Echo. The cause of death was drowning.

  Emily skimmed the article. He’d left a suicide note in his house saying he was sorry, admitting that he had killed the girl because she refused to sleep with him anymore, that he had given in to the devil and knew that he was completely responsible for her death and his own.

  Emily set the paper down and looked out the small kitchen window that pointed out into the woods that stretched all the way to the lake. She squinted, the green gathering into a mass in her eyesight, and then opened her eyes, letting the leaves and trees separate out again into individual trunks. It seemed so strange that something as serious as a person dying could have happened so close by. She wondered if he had passed her house on his way, if he had seen the light from her windows through the woods.

  Jonathan had called the night before and left a message while Emily outside in the backyard, drinking cheap wine in the dark. She had heard, faintly, the telephone ringing in the house, but there was nobody she had wanted to speak to that night, especially not Jonathan. After a few glasses of wine, she wasn’t good on the phone. She took every silence as an affront when she was drunk. Instead of answering the phone, she had sat in the dark, staring into the inky forest until she could no longer tell the leaves from the gaps between them.

  She listened to the message that morning, after folding the paper and pouring out the cold coffee into the drain.

  I want to speak with you again, he said. I had a good time. I’d like to do it again. Like I said, it’s my treat.

  By the time she listened to the message, she’d already decided not to call back right away. She was too tired to make herself sound as happy and untroubled as she wanted to sound.

  Her thoughts were filled with Mr. Rodriguez and his supposed suicide.

  She could almost see the scene, not as the paper told it, but as it had really happened, based on what she knew now about how things worked around here. Maybe he, like James Blackshaw, had been killed. Somebody might have drove up to his house at night and knocked lightly on the door, as any neighbor would. When he came to the door, somebody had covered his mouth with their hand and drug him to the truck. Or maybe they’d done it right there in the house—filled a bathtub with water and held his head under him under until he wasn’t kicking anymore. Then, maybe they’d thrown his body in the back of the truck and drove to Echo Lake, to one of the little enclaves you had to park and go through a small trail to get to, a place where teenagers went to skinny-dip and smoke pot.

  She closed her eyes. She wouldn’t think of that now. She wouldn’t let herself make a story out of it, as her mind liked to do.

  She would make things right tomorrow. Tomorrow, she would look for a job. She would call Jonathan back and explain that she hadn’t called because she’d been afraid, that she wasn’t used to another body in the bed and in the house, wasn’t used to having more than one bowl and cup of coffee out at the same time, and however he took that, it would be okay.

  And she would talk to Colleen.

  The Collinses were always wild, she’d said.

  Emily would find out how wild.

  9

  Men who worked on the county roads and at the logging camps, who had to leave home before the sun came more than a sliver over the horizon, gathered in groups in the early morning to drink coffee at the card tables and fold-up chairs in the back of Jimmy’s store. They spoke about Rodriguez’s death. They agreed that it wasn’t much of a loss.

  He had it coming, one said. His wife can hold her head up now. That little girl’s family can rest.

  I hear the note misspelled words everywhere, one said. You think the geniuses up in Keno will notice something funny about a teacher hardly able to spell? He didn’t even spell his own fucking name right, I heard. Some of the men laughed, men drinking weak coffee, the first coffee from the pot at Jimmy’s Store and therefore always the worst. The girl who worked there, seventeen and liable to run home at any time to see her baby, her breasts hurting and needing to release their milk, couldn’t make a decent cup of coffee to save her life.

  The geniuses up at Keno probably will never see that note, one said, and a few nodded, though some simply kept their mouths shut or chose that moment to walk out and get some air before they headed out to work.

  At the school, kids passed notes about what they had heard from their parents.

  Daddy said he had it coming.

  They shut the door and told me to go to bed but I stood at the crack and listened through the door. They talked about holding him down while he kicked and how he kicked one right in the teeth and his tooth is all bloodied and empty.

  And life went by as usual. The general store sold lighters and flour and the bait shop sold nightcrawlers in buckets and Tony Soltz sold weed after school in the driveway of his parent’s house. Rodriguez’s wife went to the funeral along with a handful of close relatives and almost immediately put her house up for sale, packed up, and left.

  And the lake breathed and heaved against its shores, gently pushing its edges outward.

  10

  Jonathan, she said, and she was almost embarrased at how relieved she sounded, how relieved her body felt after she said his name—she felt as though she had lost a weight from her stomach, a weight that she hadn’t known was there until she felt it lifting.

  Emily pulled the telephone down to the floor and sat with the cradle in her lap like a cat.

  I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner, she said. It was too much for a while there. My mother, what happened with her, and then you were so kind. I thought maybe you’d start to hate me for being so fucked up right from the beginning. Usually it takes a little time before I let somebody see all of that.

  She heard him breathing. He was probably in his apartment or at the shop, closing it up, counting the register before putting the money in a soft brown bag to deposit in the bank.

  Are you still there? She asked.

  Yes. He cleared his throat and the sound made her think of the fine line of his throat when he swallowed or leaned back.

  You aren’t fucked up at all, he said. You’d be surprised how fucked up I can be, too.

  He cleared his throat. But listen, I can’t spend all my time telling you how much you don’t annoy me. That gets tiresome, you know?

  I know, she said. And I’m sorry.

  He laughed. You did it again.

  I’m trying, she said.

  How about we get you out of the house? He said. I’ll take you somewhere with wine worth drinking.

  She pulled the phone away from her ear to wipe under her eyes. She wasn’t sad now. Crying was such a stupid habit, this leaking at any upheaval of happiness or sadness or anger.

  I’ll take you to a place where we can sit on a patio and watch the sun fall down over some body of water—a lake, it would have to be, but not Echo lake, we’ll get you away from it.

  She laughed. That sounds perfect, she said. I would love to. But can we do one thing first?

  She tried to see him holding the telephone, the exact placement of his hands around the receiver, the way his body leaned into whatever he was doing. She had read, and imagined it was true, that you began to hate the things about a person that you had first loved, those things that marked them as separate and not you and therefore something worth being near. Maybe she would someday hate his point-perfect attention, the way he leaned into her words and her movements toward him. But she didn’t hate it yet and tried, for once, not to anticipate everything falling apart.
/>   I’d like you to give me another Tarot reading.

  11

  James brought Connie to his trailer-house out by Echo Lake. They took the back way, skirting the forest behind the general store until the reached the dark, pine-heavy area at the west end of the lake. His trailer was there in those gnat and mosquito-infested woods. Connie felt them flying around her face, catching in her nose and one in her mouth, a tiny, struggling thing.

  Connie didn’t struggle, afraid that if she ran again, he would catch her and hurt her. Going with him, his hand around her elbow, she wasn’t as afraid as she should be. Her skin was tender where he had held it and where he pulled her, but she wasn’t afraid. She didn’t believe that he would hurt her, not now. There were too many witnesses who knew where he was going, for one thing, and if he wanted to hurt her, he could have done it already?

  She watched the back of his head, the precise place where his haircut came to a point at the back of his neck—it must have been freshly cut, as little pinpricks of black hair pepper below the hairline. She could smell him—cigarettes and hair oil and sweat and dirt.

  She wondered what he was planning to do to her.

  His trailer was filthy—not just messy, as the inside of her family’s house often was, but downright filthy. The tables were covered in dirty plates with caked-on streaks of food, opened cans with the lids pryed up and fluted edges exposed, and cups with the hardened sludge of coffee at the bottom.

  In the sink, pots and pans were piled and a dried dishrag was curled on the counter, also littered with food and cans, but also with batteries, a coil of fishing line, and a torn dog collar.