“Where do you live?” I asked again as she skirted past me and walked faster, heading for the side of the house. I followed after her, my eyes glued to her feet that never got dirty, that never made a mark.
“I live in the lake,” she said again, as if I didn’t hear her.
As she reached the front and the lake loomed before us, the water calmed instantaneously. Like there was a switch that made the currents move and stop.
I knew the girl didn’t live in the lake, but I also knew not to argue with her. She was the first girl my age that I had ever talked to. I wanted her to stay around and play with me. I wanted to give her licorice from the washbasin and ask her to stay for cake but I quickly realized the lake was the only thing she aware of now.
“Don’t go,” I cried out after her, my long legs catching up. “Please.”
“I have to go home now. He’ll find me here.”
“Who?” I asked. I was walking beside her now and struggling to keep up. Though I was tall, she was a bit taller, older and more determined. Her fair hair bounced around her face and her aqua eyes were focused on the water. She didn’t blink at all.
“Where are you going?” I asked, stopping just as my own shoes almost met the shoreline.
She didn’t answer and she didn’t stop. She walked straight into the lake, effortlessly, as if the water were just air. Her clothes didn’t even soak in the liquid. The water slid around her like a shiny curtain and within seconds her head disappeared. She was in the lake.
I took off my shoes and tossed them onto the grass behind me, thinking not to get them wet for whatever reason, and then I went in the lake too. It was cold as January and deeper than anything, not the warm shallow water it should have been. Within seconds my body had seized up from the temperature and my feet couldn’t find the muddy bottom. My head was above water, then my nose, then nothing at all. I sank and sank and sank until I found my blonde friend again.
At first I thought she was grabbing hold of my leg. Perhaps she was going to pull me up to the surface. My lungs hurt and my eyes were burning and I needed air more than anything.
But in the last moments before I lost consciousness I realized she wasn’t grabbing me.
She was bumping into me.
She was upright, swaying in the murky water like a reed in the current. Her hair floated around her like a golden net. At her feet, at her white shoes that were now muddled with scuffs and dirt, were thick, rusted chains. They wrapped around her slender ankles and thin socks and kept her down, anchored to the bottom.
She looked dead until she raised her head at me.
My own face looked back.
I screamed and a rush of water filled my lungs within seconds. The watery world became shadows.
The next thing I remembered was waking up in my own bed, covered in a thick quilt, a mug of hot tea beside me.
I was in my tiny bedroom. It was nighttime, but I didn’t know when. All I knew is that my mother was in the middle of speaking to me, as if I had been speaking to her too. It was boring stuff, something about a church and a minister.
Downstairs I heard cupboards slamming shut, a sure sign that papa was angry. Was he angry at me? What had happened?
My mother sensed my apprehension because she smoothed the hair off my head.
“You musn’t talk about that girl anymore,” she whispered. She leaned in close and I caught a whiff of the perfume she only wore on Sundays. Had I been sleeping for a couple of days now?
And the girl. The girl with the blonde hair and the boxy dress and the white shoes that wouldn’t smudge until she was dead at the bottom of the lake. She had been real. She wasn’t a dream. I had seen her, hiding behind that tomato plant.
“He’s being good not using the belt,” she continued. “You need to keep being good too.”
I wanted to say so much, but I couldn’t. I had no idea what I had been babbling about in my half-dead delirious state. There was no doubt my parents would have chalked any mentions of the girl to over-imagination, lies, and possibly the Devil’s work.
A few days later, when my parents deemed me as normal and no longer a threat to myself, we heard news from a local woodcutter who was passing through. Greta Lund, the young daughter of one of papa’s worshippers, had been found dead at the bottom of the lake. A man had been fishing and his hook got caught on her net of hair. There was no mention of chains but I knew what I had seen. I had seen her and I had seen what had really happened to her. She had been murdered. Was it the blackened man? I didn’t know at the time. But I knew then that what I saw was real and not real all at once. I was special. And not in a fortunate way.