I can’t remember what’s in the water besides my older daughter.
I take the hand of the bear I built from twigs and birch bark. The bark-bear has one glass eye, a piece of broken bottle. Night-things fly on wings like helicopter blades. A cicada brushes my cheek.
The bear eyes me askance with its piece of bottle. I think the bear stands for wisdom. I think that’s why I made it. I imagine it telling me to go back to the water and try again.
Rick left me here and took our little girl. There were two, but now there’s only one I have to fetch—the one in the water.
A bat flies overhead. Its jagged wingbeat sews the pine tops together with a loose rhythm-thread.
Rick left before I built the bear. He thought I needed to be secluded here for my sanity, or his. But he thought that before I did anything insane, like making a forest demigod. The innate bearness of bear that is also my slanted perception and that has no words of wisdom save my own. Rick doesn’t think I’m insane. He only thinks I’m grieving.
I don’t remember what else is in the water, only that something was there before she was. An older, beguiling demigod, like my bear but without twigs or glass or stone? I can’t remember.
I only know I have to wait until nighttime to go there.
The lake water eddies purple and green so dark it bleeds to black. I squat, but my legs give way. I end up sitting on the damp pier. When did my muscles fade to string beans? I’ve been waiting a day or two—no, four. There’s food in the cabin, but that has no worth when there’s no more for me to live for on this side of the water. Everything is upside down. I’m drowning in air when everything that matters is below.
She didn’t fall in.
That’s the one thing I know. When Rick took the smaller one up on his hip with tears in his eyes, he told me to stay here in case of a miracle. In case our older child returns. He said he’d be back, but for now, he was going where the pigtailed one would be safe and where he wouldn’t be afraid the water might take her too.
Something breaks the surface, so fast that all I can see is a splash of silver as the ripples catch the starlight. Flame rises in my chest. There’s something I’m supposed to fight. I can’t remember the thing, the name, the being. I only have the sense there’s a face beneath the surface.
The water trembles with laughter. Low and sentient, rife with gloating.
In the daytime there would be minnows, but it's too dark now and I can’t see what’s below. I can only imagine the dark is the reflection of all my failure to protect—that’s what Rick called it when he took the car and drove away, the little face framed by pigtails looking out the back window, not crying.
The lake laughs again, a rumble like a tremor in my bones. I thought I was sitting, but I’m on my stomach, looking down, the edge of the pier biting into my chest, leaving splinters.
I remember a yellow sleeveless shirt, but she wasn’t wearing that; we’re halfway to winter.
Something shifts below the water, dark on darkness. I can’t have my older daughter back, the water seems to say. I can’t have what was never mine.
Mine. The yellow shirt was mine. This place belonged to my grandparents, and the shirt was decades ago. I was on the dock.
The lake’s laugh shakes the dock. Remember, pathetic human.
I remember wandering to the edge of the dock when I was her age: seven. One, two, three wild daisy petals whiffling through the air, landing on the water.
In the next heartbeat, I was within water, cold and supple, making my skin dissolve into seaweed, making me one with the murk at the bottom.
My grandmother jumped off the pier in her clothes and scooped me up. Set me on the shore. “The great fish won’t have you,” she said when we were inside, drying off. “Not if I can help it.”
The great fish has my daughter. I can’t remember the daughters’ names, so in my mind, there’s the big one, whom I picture in my own yellow shirt, and there’s the little one in pigtails. Names or not, they were mine, and I won’t leave this shore. I’ll become one with the seaweed long before I’ll give up.
That’s why he left me: I wouldn’t go. I remember now. Only that part. Not the splash when she fell—
No, she didn’t fall. It was a shimmer, a wave in the shifting spiderweb fabric of air and of water woven together. I was there. I saw.
I dangle my arm over the pier’s edge and plunge my hand into the water up to the wrist. My face tilts down, off the pier, and I can almost see the waving seagrass hair of the great fish, its eye glassier than the bark-bear’s. “I won’t let you have her.” My words sound scraped over gravel, my breath a mere hiss. But the great fish hears, and a wave of cold, fishy lake water sloshes onto the pier and over me, soaking me to the skin.
I peel my lips back. “You think getting me wet will scare me? Give her back or I’ll climb down there and tear out all your seagrass hair and pluck the scale-stones from the lakebed, and your skin will ooze sick, green sludge.”
Lake-laughter echoes off the pines. The night and the great fish are not afraid of me.
I almost see it: a flash of truth, how to get her back. Not by crawling under the lake’s surface like a mite under skin. Not by insults or threats or by fighting with sharp nails and sharper teeth. No, there’s another way, but I see it and then lose it again.
Closing my eyes against the night, I breathe air laden with the slime of algae scents and slide into a half-mad state. My thoughts walk like bloody wraiths, searching for the way to get her back. The knowledge slips away, like a shade among deeper shadows.
Between layers of darkness, I can’t tell my mind’s visions from sounds from smells. The moon sings to me low and breathy. The stink of dead fish looks like too-bright starlight. And, in the confusion, I see her there in front of me, without opening my eyes: a breath-long glimpse of my daughter who no longer breathes. Standing on the dock before me, dripping, wearing my old yellow shirt but sodden and crusted with algae and misplaced scales. I’m a lost cause, she whispers to me in a voice that’s not her own. Go away and let me rest in peace. I belong to the big fish now.
My eyes snap open, and there’s no one there on the dock. Not my real daughter, and not the nightmare ghost that isn’t her. There’s not a chance I’ll follow the ghost’s instructions. If I leave, I’ll never find her.
My eyes fall closed again, and this time the seagrass sings an off-key chorus in my head. This time, in my waking nightmare, I see her floating at the water’s surface, all submerged except toes and fingertips, supported by the seagrass. As it sways, she sways too, as graceful as a dancer. If you won’t give up, rumbles a low, burbling voice that speaks directly to my thoughts, come down and join her. You’ll be together.
I consider it. The depths would be cool, in shades of green and black, with the taste of dead fish and rotting algae in every breath of water. I would learn to love those tastes, to love my waxy skin preserved by cold at the silt of the lake bed. I would sleep eternally next to her, the small body with stiff limbs forever smooth and wrapped in seaweed as carefully as ever I wrapped her in a blanket.
That’s right, says the fishy voice. This doesn’t have to be goodbye.
My younger daughter, the one who’s safe on land, comes to mind. If I slip below the cover of the lake, I won’t see her again.
In the next moment, there’s no body floating just beneath the surface. But there’s a child-sized skeleton arrayed upon the dock, its ribcage and gaping skull wreathed in ink-black seaweed. It’s … too … late, whispers a voice upon the wind, its cadence like a little girl’s.
My eyes open once more, to the empty dock, the lapping water, the moonlight that no longer sings. In the quiet, I mull over the messages, the duelling shadows of intention. My daughter has told me to leave, and the fish has told me to stay. I am as much a swirl of murkiness inside as the lake itself. What is right and what is true? Where’s the lie in either of their demands? It’s too late, too late by any sane measure. But I absolutely cannot go.
Then I see it—one shade among the others glowing a cooler gray. I have to be both—have to do both things—accept that it’s too late to go back, to make this not have happened. She’s already been stolen, and I can’t turn back time.
But neither can I leave her.
Something new wavers in the depths, not part of the seagrass but among it: a flicker of muted yellow. A small hand’s there, waving to me.
A distant engine rumbles low. Maybe that was the laughter I heard.
The hand waves again, now green in the water.
I waved at the fish that day, a third of a century ago. I didn’t see the great fish, but I knew it was there, and I waved at it and said hello.
It’s you I want. Always you. The great fish wants to be perceived. Of course. The fish wants what we all want, and I never saw it with my eyes the way I see it now. The tide laps at the gray edges of my mind, showing me a fish that has no blood or bones. It’s within the lake and is the lake as much as my bear is me. The fish and the bear are both wrong, stuck together with mud, but both are real—realer than water or sky.
I swirl my hand in the water with graceful fingers that sing come hither. “Give her back,” I croon, “and you’ll have me instead.”
Reflections from headlights bounce over the lake’s surface. I know the sound as Rick’s car. It comes to a stop in front of the cabin. It will take him a few minutes to discover me down here at the water.
I lean down so low my lips almost touch the water. “Give her back, quick, or the man in that truck will take me away, and I’ll be lost to you forever.”
Another wave swirls over the pier. It pulls me off the wood, down into the depths of the lake. From under the surface, I see the child sitting on the pier, dripping, stunned, in that upside-down world of air.
Long seagrass fins wrap around me and drag me to the bottom where the mud is soft and silky.
Running footsteps pound the pier. He’s there, and she’s in his arms. His sobs sound strange and distorted under the water, but I hear her voice clearly: “It’s okay, Daddy. Don’t cry.”
I can’t see his face as he looks down into the water. Everything is too dark up there. I was bluffing with my promise, didn’t know the lake’s great fish would take me. But of course it didn’t trust me, so it took me by force.
Now that I’m here, the silt is a silky bed.
A hand breaks through the water’s surface, reaching for mine. A hand that looks familiar. Is it made of Rick’s skin stretched over twigs and bark? No, it’s him, his real hand. Because he was never going to leave me in the water. I grasp the slippery fingers.
