The Fall, the Water, the Weight

THE FALL, THE WATER, THE WEIGHT

by Lina Rather

When Oliver calls me at three in the morning, I know it’s him before I even open my eyes. There’s no one else in the world who’d be on the phone at this time of night.

His voice is raspy when I pick up. “Charlotte. Julia’s missing.”

I don’t know what to say for a long moment. I slip out of bed and pad to the kitchen to avoid waking the cat, lean against the counter. “What do you mean? Where?”

“They found her car parked off on the side of Fulsom Road last night.” He pauses, sucks in air. In the background there’s a wooshing noise like traffic. Maybe he’s out there now. Fulsom’s not far from the highway. We used to park on the shoulder sometimes, back when we were kids, to avoid paying the fee to get into the state park. “Her mom called me a couple hours ago.” Another pause. This one stretches so long that I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not sleepwalking again. When he speaks, he’s whispering. “They found her shoes by the waterfall.”

In the morning, I get on a plane.

•••

There used to be four of us. Me, Anna, Julia, Oliver. We’d been friends since elementary school. The thing with the waterfall started the summer before sophomore year of high school, when Julia got her driver’s license.  That was back when only Oliver knew he was a boy, though he’d cut his hair short at the beginning of the summer in a particularly unflattering bowl cut. Anna was already dying, though she didn’t know it yet.

Julia was drunk with power, being the first of us to have both a license and a car. Every other day she showed up at my house with Oliver and Anna already in the backseat and we’d trek somewhere new. In August, we always went to the state park, because you could swim in the waterfall if none of the rangers were out.

In 1973, they put our waterfall on the cover of a state guidebook, it was that beautiful. A blue-green river running clear and true down a ten-foot drop. Trouble was the swimming hole at the end was too dark to see the bottom and it went thirty feet deep in some places. A sign nailed to a dying pine shouted SWIM AT OWN RISK. Someone died there every couple of summers because they cracked their head on the rocks and slipped under or because they underestimated just how long a swim it was across. The rangers would yell at you if they saw you diving, but the fall was far enough into the park that they rarely made the walk.

“You know what they say about this place,” Julia said one afternoon, floating on her back in the water in her shorts and a bikini top. She opened one eye and grinned at us. She had six months on me, Oliver, and Anna and she knew it. She was always the one telling spooky stories at sleepovers and orchestrating plans to sneak into R-rated movies. She stretched her toes, wiggling them in the sun. “They say it’s a portal.”

Anna rolled her eyes, but she paddled over and kissed Julia on the cheek, her silver charm bracelet glittering underwater. They were a package deal, those two. Ever since middle school. Who knows what would have happened if we’d all grown up, but for those years they were in love. “You’re full of shit.”

“It’s true!” Julia sent an arc of water towards Anna. It hit both her and me, but neither of us splashed Julia back. We knew when she was in a storytelling mood. “My great-grandmother told me. People used to see lights here. Will-o’-the-wisps.”

“Will-o’-the-wisps come from England,” Oliver interjected. He was lounging on the shore with a book.

Julia pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “Maybe they arrived on the Mayflower. But anyway, my grandma told me that people used to disappear here. Ever since the town started. And in the Great Depression babies got left here, if their families couldn’t feed them. Because their parents figured the fairies will take them. So they just gave their kids to the will-o’-the-wisps.”

Anna laughed. I said, “So the parents let them starve, and told themselves they’d gone to live with the wee folk?”

“Maybe their little bones are here,” Oliver said and made a fake shocked face. “Maybe you’re swimming over them.”

“You’re all so morbid,” Julia said. “It’s just a story.”

And it was, then. Not so much later.

•••

Oliver picks me up at the airport. He’s haggard, with circles under his eyes and his dark hair looks like he brushed it without a mirror. Or a brush. He braces himself on the steering wheel. “How was that fair you went to?”

“Made some money.” I’m an artist by trade. I tell people I’m a sculptor, but really it’s more garden ornaments and décor for children’s rooms than high art.  Birdbaths with fairies perched on the edge, mobiles of wire-wrapped butterflies, teapots with frogs inside. The sort of thing that sells well enough at art fairs and church sales. Empty-nester moms love their stupid-expensive lawn ornaments.

“Good,” he says, nods. He scratches at his goatee. It’s an old nervous habit. Before he had the beard he used to scratch at his wrists. The morning of the SAT he had red marks all up his forearms.

“Did you try calling her?” I ask.

“Of course I tried calling her. Everybody’s tried fucking calling her. You think her mom would have called me if she’d answered her phone?” He sighs. “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

After what happened with Anna, we scattered. Oliver went to college way out East. I got a full ride to a state school in Ohio then moved out to Oregon where I figured the art scene was better. Julia vanished for a while, reappearing every year or so to give us a call before falling off the map again. I kept up with her publications, but they never appeared in the same place twice. Last I heard, she was living in Georgia, but that was eighteen months ago. Oliver and I were probably the last of her friends that her mom had a phone number for. Or whose names she knew.

Oliver comes to a stop sign and lingers. Left is town, where we can go say our hellos to Julia’s mom and let others do the searching. Right is the state park. I point right. “You know where we have to go.”

•••

We found out Anna was dying in the fall of sophomore year, right before school started. Cancer. Later it came out that the factory in the next town upriver, the one that was surrounded by razor wire and that had been shut down since we were toddlers, had pumped heavy metals into the drinking water for years. It had produced the beepers for supermarket self-checkouts, and apparently that takes a lot of lead. Talk around town was that the government was supposed to designate a Superfund site, but no one in a hazmat suit ever showed. Maybe that was the cause, or maybe it was just dumb luck.

She did chemo, radiation, the whole nine yards. Her hair fell out and they put a port in her chest. She started smelling like rubber gloves and hand sanitizer. By Christmas they were talking about transplants, homeschooling, experimental therapies.

It wasn’t an inspirational tragedy and it wasn’t beautiful. It was just fucking terrifying.

Her parents still let us over because the doctors said we’d spent enough time together that we probably had the same germs. And Julia would have beaten down the door if they hadn’t. I think by that point Anna’s parents realized the two of them were dating, but they still let Julia sleep over. I don’t think they ever talked about it though, Anna and her parents. Back then we all thought we’d rather die than come out to our families, but if it had really come down to it? I don’t know. Now that I’m older it seems a shame to die with your family only knowing half the truth of you, but it would hardly be Anna’s fault if she did. It was so easy to imagine disaster. I didn’t tell my parents until I got a girlfriend the year after college, and they still blamed it on the influence of liberal higher education until I was twenty-five.

We’d sit in the basement with a space heater on and watch movies. Or tool around in the car, not stopping anywhere in case Anna picked something up from a stranger.

By Easter, they were talking about last tries.

Anna asked us over at the end of April. Her father answered the door because her mother was in the kitchen, pretending she wasn’t crying.

Anna was in the basement. All the lights were off, so the blue glow from the TV made the angles in her face look like a skull. All the bones in her head stuck out through her skin. She had papers all around her. Books. Old newspapers. Print-outs. I picked up a particularly ornate hardback, with its title done in copper gilt. Myths of the American Midwest.

Anna laid her head in Julia’s lap. Oliver perched on the edge of the couch, chewing the edge of his thumbnail. I had a feeling in my stomach like I’d eaten something bad.

“I need your help,” Anna said. She stared up at us. Her eyes were huge in proportion to the rest of her now. “You’ll help me, won’t you?”

•••

When Oliver pulls up to the booth at the entrance of the state park, the ranger waves him on by. We creep down the gravel road to the parking lot nearest to the trail, and then go on foot. I see the police tape before I see the waterfall. Not that there’s much to tape off—as far as I can tell, the only thing of interest to them is the pair of shoes neatly arranged at the edge of the trail. Black lace-up heels, the kind of thing I can imagine Julia picking up in a thrift store for fifteen dollars.

There’s a couple of rangers here in their golf carts. The sheriff’s standing by the water, hat tipped far back on his head so he can peer into the pool. A deputy—likely the person who’s been here all night, based on the size of the coffee he’s drinking—nods at Oliver as we step over the yellow tape. 

The sheriff raises an eyebrow over his standard-issue aviators. “Don’t step on anything we might need.” He doesn’t say what that might be. 

“We’re friends of Julia’s.” Oliver squares his shoulders, straightens up. 

The sheriff seems like he might protest and then he shrugs. Small towns. He knows we don’t mean any harm. “We’re going to have searchers go out in a little while. You know where she might be?”

The water, I want to say, and bite down hard on the inside of my cheek. 

Oliver shakes his head. “I’m afraid we’d grown apart lately. She lived so far away, you understand. We were good friends in school.”

“With that dead girl,” the sheriff says. I start. Oliver keeps his cool. He’s always been a rock. “I was a deputy back then. That was bad business. Poor kid. You know her parents left?”

I did. Anna’s mother and father moved away in what would have been her freshman year of college, and didn’t tell anyone where they were going. I didn’t blame them. It was a miracle that they stayed together at all. 

The sheriff points out to the waterfall. “I’m getting the state troopers to send us some divers. You know how the water is here.”

Oliver nods and thanks him. My blood is pounding in my ears like the falls. I haven’t been back here except in my dreams. It’s much prettier than it is in my sleep, the water rolling down the rock hills, the soft hiss like a relaxation CD. Oliver and I clamber up the boulders to the spot we used to jump from.

“Do you think it worked?” I ask. Probably should whisper, but I’m too tired. “With Anna?”

Oliver crosses his arms over his chest. He’s grown a thousand-yard stare, I notice. But I’ve been told the same. In all the years since, we’ve never talked about that day straight-on. “If it didn’t, we killed her. But I think I’m okay with that, too.”

•••

That last day, I drove down to the falls even though I only had my learner’s permit because Julia’s hands were shaking too badly. We paid the entrance fee to establish evidence that we were actually there and made a big show of unpacking our picnic basket and towels. In retrospect, I can’t remember the conversation where we planned all the details. It must have happened, but it’s slipped from my memory along with our eighth-grade dance and every math class I took after algebra. I like to think we protested, but maybe not. We didn’t tell anyone who could have stopped us, at least. I guess that’s what friends are for. 

Down by the edge of the water, Anna slipped off her flip-flops. 

“Don’t you want to eat first?” Julia asked.

Anna took one step into the water, then another. “What’s the point?”

Dying had made her utterly accepting. Maybe she had been a monk in another life, dedicated to the study of the present moment. 

“Wait for us,” Oliver said. We stripped down to our bathing suits and piled our clothes up the hill where they could stay dry and not incriminate us. 

Anna was up to her waist by the time we got in. She was shivering and even her scalp had goosebumps, but she kept inching forward. She stopped right before the first drop-off and undid her charm bracelet.

“Here,” she said, and held it out to Julia. It was a heavy thing, with charms from each one of our school trips and her family vacations, and her hand trembled. Sixteen years added up in a quarter-pound of metal. “The books say they don’t like silver.”

Julia saved them both by taking it silently. It slipped over her hand and she clasped it with her teeth. It took her another minute to swallow back whatever objections she had and when she did, her eyes were glassy. 

We waded out until it was too deep, and then we swam to the middle. Anna was flagging by the end and I wrapped an arm around her to keep her afloat. She barely weighed anything. As much as a full sack of groceries. 

We each had an offering. For me it was a penny; for Julia, a packet of powdered milk; for Oliver, a piece of bread; for Anna, a drop of her blood, drawn with a pin. This was traditional, according to the articles we’d found. People really had left their babies here, swaddled alongside a slice of cheese or another sacrifice to curry favor. A jar of pickles, a slice of pink ribbon, a feed-sack doll. 

The blood turned to a thin thread in the water and then dispersed. The water didn’t look any different. I couldn’t see my toes. 

“Okay,” Anna said. She took one deep breath and then another, psyching herself up. She grabbed Julia and Oliver’s hands. “Thank you.”

“We’ll be right here.” Julia didn’t add if you change your mind or if you want to die more slowly but the words weighed on us all the same. If it had been me, I think I would have begged. I would have asked for one more minute. Even without loving Anna the way Julia did, it was on my tongue as I held her. When I grew up I realized what steel that really took. Julia must have known that if she asked for anything—a last kiss, a lingering moment—our resolve would have broken. We had only the smallest window of being young and desperate and believing enough to do it.

Anna leaned back in my arms until she was floating on her back. I let go. We all paddled back a few feet so she was in the center of our small circle. Here came the hard part. The oldest stories—the ones of girls flinging themselves into the falls to escape unhappy marriages and never surfacing, of tubercular and desperate young men—said you had to go willingly. But they also said there was no easy way to go into the water, that the cost to open the door was the struggle and the fear. There is no painless way to drown.

Anna let herself sink. The water covered her eyes, then her mouth, then the tip of her nose. Little bubbles popped on the edge of her lips. It seemed like this was it; she’d just sink.

Then her eyes flew open and her chest heaved, body fighting for survival, ribs spasming in her shirt. She came clawing up, sputtering, choking, coughing up water and green phlegm. Julia held her arms while she gasped, keeping both their heads above water.

“This isn’t working.” Anna wrapped her arms around herself and pulled away from Julia, who was the only one to guess what she was thinking.

“No,” Julia said, and her voice sounded like she’d been the one sucking water. “No, I won’t.”

But she dove with me anyway, three or four times to scrape the bottom of the pond for rocks. Anna stuffed her pockets and her shirt while Oliver held her up and finally Julia came up with a rock the size of a full-grown snapping turtle for Anna to cradle in her arms. 

“You know,” Julia said, “I would follow you anywhere.”

Anna nodded. I think she didn’t trust herself to speak. Oliver slipped his arms out from under hers then, and she sank. It was quick this time.

She was out of sight in a minute, but I felt her foot brush my leg as she went down. So soft I could have imagined it was a bluegill swimming by, if I hadn’t felt her toenails scrape my skin. 

Sometimes I still have this dream, where I’m swimming in the pond and I see a flash of white in the water. I dive down to the kelp and the sand and way dark deep, and that’s when she touches me. She’s always behind me, out of sight, but I feel her warmth, that single instant where her body touches mine as she sinks. And then she’s gone, and there’s only the cold and the fish, just like in real life.

I think I will have that dream as long as I live. 

•••

The sheriff is talking about dredging the pond. They did that after Anna went missing, though they never found anything besides a couple of beer cans and somebody’s old Walkman. Not that it means much—police searches have missed whole cars before, their drivers drowned at the bottom of rivers or retention ponds. 

Back then, the cops dragged us into the police station one by one, but we’d gotten our stories straight long before. We’d had a picnic. Anna got up, said she had to use the bathroom. Then she just walked away. We repeated it over and over again, and they believed us, because what was the alternative? Anna was sick, she had known she was dying, she’d decided to do it her own way. And that was the truth, of a sort. 

I doubt they’ll find anything if the swimming hole gets dredged now, either. 

Oliver sits down on a rock next to the edge of the falls and kicks his feet out over the drop. “They probably aren’t going to dredge it. It’s expensive. They don’t know for sure she went in. And from what I’ve overheard, Julia doesn’t have many people waiting on her.”

Not here, at least. Her father skipped out before we knew each other, and she was never that close to her mom. I realize I don’t know much about Julia’s life now. She’s never in any of our phone calls mentioned a girlfriend, a job, friends. She’s stuck in my mind at sixteen, swimsuit on, cheap mascara running down her face. The last thing of hers I read was a poem in a journal out of Miami and one of the lines read My heart is a haunted house. 

It’s been boiling here for weeks. Record high temperatures, climate change turning temperate forest to desert. The fall’s still pretty, but half what it used to be, and the pond’s lower than I’ve ever seen it. If the drought continues like this, it’ll dry up someday and then we’ll know for sure if Anna is really at the bottom. 

“I think this would be better if we just knew,” Oliver says. He unclasps his watch, scratches at the skin underneath. 

I think of Julia saying I would follow you anywhere. Maybe she did, fifteen years late. Maybe she’s off getting drunk somewhere. According to the sheriff she arrived in town yesterday morning, bought cigarettes at the Kum n’ Go, and then drove straight to the park. Maybe she was thinking about going into the pond and then walked off instead. I’ve seen stranger things happen. “Maybe.”

Oliver leans his head back so the sun pours down on his face. “Sometimes I think about who we might have been if it weren’t for what happened to Anna.”

“You think it changed us?” I ask. Stupid question, and I’m rewarded with a frown.

Of course it changed us. I make fairies for a living, can’t keep a girl, and my dreams all revolve around dark water and a brush of skin-against-skin in the cold. Oliver went to art school, but now he works in data analysis because he can never sell his paintings—they’re beautiful, but they are all of death, bright-faced girls falling headlong into murky streams or vanishing into gaping crevices. They are too personal to be understood by anyone but us. Everyone else just sees stereotypical pretty dying girls, a trope so well-worn it’s got a sarcastic Wikipedia page. There’s no way to say in an artist’s statement this happened, this is real, this isn’t your goddamn tragedy porn. And Julia was brilliant as a kid, the sort of brilliant that should have got her full rides and a job doing anything but wandering from place to place with fifty bucks to her name and a bunch of secrets locked in her head. And she remade herself over and over to try and escape this place, but she’s ended up back all the same.

We grew up too fast, I think. 

I jump up and kick off my shoes. My heart’s in my throat like thyroid cancer, the way it always is when I think about the could-have-beens. The rock feels the same. Cool under my feet, worn down to fine grit by the water and by generations of us jumping. For a split second, I feel fourteen again in an ugly tankini, waiting for Anna to swim out of the way so I can throw myself off.

Oliver knows what I’m going to do before I do. He stands next to me, unbuttons his plaid shirt, tosses it away. The sheriff down below stops talking, his eyes tracking our three steps backward. The deputy looks up, squints, starts to shout something lost in the hiss of the falls.

It’s too late anyway. My feet scrape the edge of the rocks, toes curling over the edge. My body’s heavier than it was and all the diving I’ve done for years is into a pool at the Y. But my aim’s still true and I meet the water at the deepest point. 

And it’s so, so cold. I can’t believe we used to do this for fun. My first thought is teenagers are masochists. I almost open my mouth and gasp out of sheer reflex but then my fingers scrape the muck at the bottom and I remember why I’m here. I open my eyes—another skill I’ve apparently retained, though I haven’t had the urge to torture myself with sand in my eyes for ten years—and there’s Oliver just a few feet ahead, digging in the dark mud. 

I don’t even know what I’m looking for. I dread finding nothing but pebbles, dread feeling the prickle of someone behind me, dread looking down to see Julia’s body. The horror of that last possibility is almost enough to drive me up to the surface. (Someone would have seen her go in, I tell myself, though I know it’s a lie.)

My throat spasms. My lungs burn. Oliver kicks to keep himself down but we’re not teenagers anymore and neither of us wants to drown here. 

One more try. I drag my fingers through grass and mud and stones, break my fingernails in the sand. And something catches. I can’t even check what it is. My body demands up and I go.

Oliver surfaces next to me, gasping. 

“Hey!” The sheriff shouts from the shore. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

We ignore him. I cradle the object in my hand, wash the mud from it as carefully as I can. 

It’s a charm bracelet. It looks like it’s been in the water for years. Some of the plating’s worn away and there’s green-black crust all over so that some of the links are sealed together. Like something Jacques Cousteau brought up from a shipwreck.

It’s Anna’s. There’s the sailboat from the class trip to Mackinac Island in seventh grade. There’s the horse from when her family visited California. There’s the star her grandparents gave her after she got sick and the heart that Julia got at Wal-Mart for their first anniversary. I know Julia kept it, but this looks decades old. Older than me. 

They don’t like silver, Anna said, all those years ago. Whatever’s down there spat it back out. Gave us a sign.

Oliver peels my fingers open and his hands are shaking. He can’t bring himself to touch the bracelet but his breath shudders. It’s something like relief. 

We swim back to shore. Oliver gets his shirt. The sheriff’s glaring at us like he thinks we’re crazy, which we probably are. He’s moving towards his handcuffs but he stops himself and shakes his head at me, like he doesn’t have the words.

“We just had to look,” I say.

“You see anything?”

Oliver shakes his head. “I don’t think you’re going to find her.”

Now the deputy looks scared. He keeps glancing at the water. Maybe he’s smarter than the sheriff. 

They’re still staring after us when we leave. No one follows us to the car. It’s a clear day, not a cloud in the sky, so I can hear the sound of water pounding against rock all the way back to the park entrance. Or I imagine I can.

We drive as long as we can stand, to the pub on Main Street full of smoke and men as old as I feel, and we drink for those who didn’t make it.

LINA RATHER is a speculative fiction writer living in Washington, D.C. When she isn't writing, she likes to cook, go hiking, and collect terrible 90's comic books. Her work has appeared in  Shimmer, Flash Fiction Online, and Lightspeed, among others. You can find her on her website, linarather.wordpress.com or on Twitter.

The Fall, the Water, the Weight by Lina Rather can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 1.2.