“Beatrice!” he called. His voice sounded calm, even friendly. “You out here?”
I ducked back under and swam away, the water growing dark and murky, the rotten roots of underwater trees, yellowed and tangled, wafting what looked like chimney soot. I could no longer feel my feet or hands. My thoughts were cloudy and strange. As I swam past the debris of a sunken skiff, the faded words Little Bird barely visible, I felt the pull of an undertow. I tried to fight it, but the current was too powerful. As soon as I recognized the deep thundering drone of a waterfall, it was too late; I was plunging through the air. Spray blasted me like a fire hose. Rocks knocked my head and scraped my hands, branches clawing my face. White trees. Blue sky. They flipped over me and under me. I kept waiting to hit the ground, for it all to go black, but the end refused to come.
I was falling, falling for what felt like an hour, every inch of my body freezing, stiffening.
Then I hit a boulder. Life left me like light from a bulb with the flip of a switch.
When I opened my eyes, I was submerged in freezing water.
How many times had I been here before? Four times? Four million?
Fish swirled around me like murderous thoughts. I swam into them and they scattered.
I floated deep under the water until I spotted his boat. The water was getting colder. A thin layer of ice was forming on the surface, growing thicker by the minute. I could see Cannon, searching for me. Grabbing a submerged piece of driftwood, I swam directly underneath the hull, clinging there, breathing through a hole in the ice around the boat’s edge. I yanked off my pink T-shirt and let it drift to the other side. Cannon, thinking it was me, bent over to pull it out, and as he did, I surfaced and jammed the wood in his back as hard as I could. He cried out in surprise, pitching forward, losing his balance, somersaulting through the ice. I climbed into the boat, nearly capsizing it. I yanked the cord to start the engine. I pried off Cannon’s hands gripping the side and veered the boat away.
“Beatrice!” he howled, waving at me. “Come back!”
I ignored him. His old gray hoodie and a red flannel blanket were folded up around a thermos in the hull. I yanked on the sweater, wrapped the blanket around my shoulders. I unscrewed the thermos and drank. It was tea, so hot it scalded my mouth.
I drove on. It was impossible to see where I was going. The fog disclosed only inches of the world at a time. Blue water, driftwood, blackened tree trunks—they appeared suddenly, ramming the sides of the boat, causing the engine to stall. After a while I could hear the deafening roar of the waterfall and Cannon far behind me. He was crying.
“I’m freezing. I’m going to die here. Help me, Beatrice.”
I wasn’t sure how far I’d gone when I spotted a coil of long blond hair under the ice, ice at least three inches thick. I smashed it with the oar, realizing in shock that it was Whitley floating there. She was barely conscious. A few feet away, trapped under the ice, were Martha and Kipling.
One by one, I heaved them into the boat. They were half dead, heads lolling. I placed them in the stern, pulled off their boots and jeans and T-shirts, pulled the blanket over their legs to get them warm, poured tea into their mouths.
Soon they showed signs of life.
“What is happening?” asked Martha.
I told her. She asked to see Cannon, so I turned the boat back, steering between the trees until we stumbled upon him. He was clinging to a trunk, so much ice encrusting his beard it was completely white.
He was dead. His lips were blue. He had pulled off all his clothes.
“His wake must be years if his hair is this long,” whispered Martha, touching a frozen strand. She turned to me. “We have to keep at this, but next time, keep him alive. It’s up to you, Bee. We don’t arrive in time. So get control of the boat, restrain him, but keep him alive until we get here. Then we can vote.”
Cannon’s not himself anymore. How can he vote?
I wanted to ask this, only I realized as the boat jerked backward suddenly that we were getting pulled into the waterfall.
I grabbed the oar, trying to fight it. Martha grabbed the other paddle. Whitley tried to grab hold of passing tree trunks to stop us. Kipling could only stare out at the fog, petrified. It was futile, of course. In less than a minute, the skiff was swinging into the throes of the current, water pounding us. We were rocketing past boulders, ricocheting against trees, overturning into the whiteout. The last thing I saw was Whitley reaching out to try to grab my hand as the boat fell out from under us and we fell.
The vote. The vote. The vote.
How long did it all go on? The fight for the skiff. Cannon’s rescue. Binding his ankles and wrists. Hauling my friends out of the ice.
I did it over and over again, in the freezing cold, trying not to drown.
I tried different tactics every time. Cannon might have been half mad, but he was on to me. He was a strange, terrifying foe, at times vicious, other times childlike. He was the worst person to have to capture alive, because I knew him from before. There were times when he was his old self again, funny and kind and sensitive, vocal about wanting to help me, to do everything in his power to make it better. Inevitably, though, he’d cast this persona off like a Halloween costume, revealing someone upended by rage and regret. I understood then that Cannon had always lived his life with his future glory in mind, that every moment of his every day and every act of kindness had been because he was expecting that at some future date he would be somebody at last. Now that he had no future, he didn’t know how to exist.
He’d shout his grievances into the fog.
“I was duped. Swindled. First there was the nightmare of Jim. And now this? Are you kidding me? It isn’t supposed to be like this. I’m supposed to grow up! I’m supposed to have another seventy years! I never made an impression. It’s like I was never even here. Was I here? Was I even here, Beatrice? Beatrice! Where are you?”
Sometimes, when Cannon gave me trouble, I was too late freeing the others from the ice. When I found them they were all dead except Martha. She was always semiconscious, deliriously whispering the same two words over and over again.
It’s you.
After a while, I had a map of the entire Blue Lake in my head like a blind man who’s memorized every inch of his neighborhood. I knew where every dead tree stood, where every boulder sat, when every spray of water would firework over the rocks into oblivion.
The chance for the vote inched closer. Faster and faster I restrained Cannon. This had as much to do with his increasing fatigue, his resignation, as with my speed and resolve. I bound his hands and ankles with a yellow vine ripped from the bottom of the lake, pulling him up into the boat, leaving him sulking in the bow. Faster and faster I revived the others.
The remainder of my wake was eleven minutes. Eleven minutes between the time they were warm and under the blanket and the moment I rigged the boat to the trees so we wouldn’t plunge into the waterfall. Eleven minutes to vote.
“I’m not voting,” Cannon always said.
“Yes you are,” said Whitley.
“No.”
“Then you’ll drown here.”
He laughed. I’d grown used to his mad cackle by then, but it still scared the others.
“Drowning? You think I’m scared of drowning? Drowning for me is shaking a hand. It’s saying ‘Have a nice day!’ It’s saying ‘Would you like an Egg McMuffin with those hotcakes?’ It’s saying ‘Welcome to Home Depot, can I help you select a Weedwacker?’?”
“Please stop,” whispered Whitley, trying not to cry.
The vote. The vote. The vote.