Ebb and Flow

Gemma was exhausted. It wasn’t a new experience, it had been her default setting for so long now that she almost didn’t remember any alternatives. The disease eating away at her bones and her blood ate her strength before she could use it, and the drugs were fighting her body as much as it was fighting the cells trying to kill her. She almost hadn’t made it to her appointment today, the chills and the shaking and the nausea all so bad she could barely get out of bed, it had only been Tim’s solid presence that had given her the spark of defiance to push out from the heavy covers of their bed and drag her broken body to the car.

And it was all for nothing.

Her doctors looked at her with sad eyes that told her everything she needed to know before they had opened the carefully neat folders on the desk. The last ditch effort hadn’t worked. The risky drug trial was a bust. The only thing she couldn’t guess was how long they would give her. Would it be a week, a month, or a year. In the end it didn’t matter, she supposed, oddly calm about the whole thing. She had known from the day her nose wouldn’t stop bleeding that the end was nigh and it was just a matter of when the clock would run out.

“… a month, maybe six weeks.” She tuned in for the important part and then out again, preferring to watch the swallows flick their tales and flutter from twig to twig.

Tim would listen and tell her whatever she missed, or forgot. He had become her memory over the last two years, a crutch she hated needing, but couldn’t do without. One she would selfishly let hear all of the bad news and keep it as a dark weight inside himself that she didn’t have to share.

Leaving him in the office, talking insistently with the doctors probably trying to find some lifeline that just wasn’t there, she drifted listlessly out into the anti-septic corridor. The large windows that looked out over the grey wintery gardens three floors below caught her attention. The dull watery light doing little to dispel the harsh fluorescence. It wasn’t the long familiar view, or the sunlight that drew her in, it was the woman standing in the light. Gemma thought she recognised her, but it couldn’t be. Kathleen had been diagnosed a few months after Gemma and they had gone through treatment together. Riding out the harsh ups and down as they watched their lives be striped away from them one hope at a time.

But this woman, she was standing tall, not hunched with the chill of death creeping at your heels.

“Kathleen?” Gemma shuffled the last few difficult feet.

“Gemma!” It was her friend, the brightest smile that Gemma had even seen beaming at her. “Oh, dear. Oh, no.” It fell immediately, seeing the defeat that Gemma knew was all that was on her face. “I’m so sorry love.” A cloud of soft cotton and summer lilac engulfed her.

“How are you so well?” She couldn’t keep the accusation and jealousy out of her voice. They had the same cancer and the same treatments, they should have the same death sentence.

Kathleen put a gentle hand on her arm and drew her out of the flow of people. “I wasn’t.” She promised in a fervent whisper. “The doctors told me last week, the trial didn’t work. I don’t think it worked for any of us.”

“Then how?” She didn’t have the energy to shout or scream. All she had left was the bone deep exhaustion.

“There’s a lake, a couple hours out of the city.” Kathleen explained.

= + =

The city had long faded from sight in her rear view mirror. It was a trip Gemma was making alone, the first thing she had done on her own in two years. Tim had refused, telling her he wasn’t going to help her die, that he didn’t care what Kathleen said, it was all bullshit. There was no miracle cure waiting for her in rural nowhere.

Bag in hand he had walked out.

Which was fine! She thought angrily. She didn’t need him anyway.

Her fingers were white knuckled on the steering wheel as a wave of nausea threatened to overtake her. Breathing deep, she forced everything to stay where it was so that she could keep driving.

The long drive seemed to last forever. Feeling unsafe at anything other than a speed her grandmother would scoff at, it was well past dark before Gemma pulled her beat up Toyota into the dark gravel car-park of the small bed and breakfast that was the only accommodation in the blip of a town Kathleen had directed her to.

A two story red brick Georgian Colonial house that had probably once been a wealthy land-owner’s home swam out of the darkness. There was a single light glowing gold above the door and slivers of light under the drawn curtains, but that was it, the rest of the house was swathed in darkness with the soft shushing of a large body of water near by the only sound.

An involuntary shiver ran down Gemma’s spine as she gathered her purse and single overnight back from the back seat. It was nothing, she told herself, the final dregs of the chemo taking its last bite out of her body. That didn’t stop her from glancing around herself nervously at the dark night. She was a city girl and the lack of neon-glow, shouting people, or the honk of a hundred taxi’s was more disconcerting that she had thought it would be. Hurrying across the shadowed lot, she wrapped shaking fingers around the straps of her bags, only letting go when she was in the well of light and able to ring the door bell.

A brassy tinkle sounded from somewhere deep inside the building. For a long time nothing happened, the night was silent around her. Wasn’t there meant to be crickets and owls and shit? Where was the sounds of nightlife that all of the out-doorsy people raved about?

“Hello?”

Gemma jumped at the voice and the square of golden light that had appeared in front of her while she was wool-gathering. “Oh, hi…” She didn’t have the energy to finish the sentence, letting the sound just trail off.

They stared at each other in awkward silence for a long moment.

The tiny grandmotherly women sighed. “Come in dear.” She held the door wider and stepped aside. “Let me take that, you look done in.” The hand that took the larger of Gemma’s bag seemed to be made of steel compared to her own feeble grip.

“Thank you.” She whispered and followed the woman into the warm and inviting interior.

= + =

With what seemed like little effort, Gemma was stripped of her coat, wrapped in a wool blanket and installed on a soft, deep armchair beside a happily crackling fire.

The woman, Sarah, was still bustling around in the background, the whistle of the kettle filling the space. By tiny inches Gemma forced her body to relax into the cushions. Once she finally got there, she found that it was an experience her body barely recognised anymore. She had existed on a knife’s edge for so long that having the final hurdle so close, the final attempt at a life that she knew either way would be the end of the line, was a relief.

“I know why you are here dear,” Sarah handed over a steaming mug of hot chocolate before finally taking the other seat, “and it will not end well for you.”

“It’s not like any of the other options are any better.” It was a bluster, Gemma had no other options. Or the only other one was a cold, empty apartment. Not even Harvey, her thousand year old labrador waiting for her.

“Oh I know.” Sarah patted her hand comfortingly. “But I have never let a child walk into the darkness without knowing what they were facing. The lake is not a miracle, it is not a place of God.” Unconsciously, knobbled fingers crept across thickly knitted wool to pat at the battered gold crucifix. “It is a place of an old God, a spirit of nature and chaos not of people.”

Sarah’s voice hadn’t changed, but a primordial shiver ran down Gemma’s spine. The few hairs on her body that the chemo hadn’t stolen were standing on end.

“God abandoned me a long time ago.” She had grown up Catholic, her parents still went to church every Sunday, but she hadn’t been able to step foot in one since her diagnosis.

“God hasn’t abandoned you.” It was the same platitudes that her family had given her, and her eye roll didn’t go unnoticed. “He hasn’t dear. God stands above and apart. Watching over us all, but allowing nature to intervene. But He isn’t why we are here today. ” Sarah stood and began puttering again as she talked. “We are here to talk about the god of the lake.”

“So there is something down there?” Gemma asked. Kathleen hadn’t been able to answer any of her questions, only telling her that the lake was special.

Sarah shrugged. “You have a better chance to find out than I do. Although others have tried and found nothing. A group of scientists about five years ago came and stayed here for a few weeks.” Sarah settled again, becoming absorbed in her story. “They came with a whole van of sick animals. The poor things. I had half a mind to call those Peter people,”

“PETA.” Gemma interrupted. “Why didn’t you?”

“The less people poking their noses into the Lake’s business the better.” Sarah’s voice was sharp for the first time. “That’s what I am trying to tell you. It isn’t something to play with. Better to live what is left of your life than take whatever pain it doles out.”

“All I have is pain.” Gemma argued.

“Be that as it may, let me finish my story. The scientists from the city with their sick animals. Each day, they tied an animal at the lake shore, set up those new fangled camera things and watched it all on their computers” The sharpness had softened into grief. “In the blink of any eye, too fast for the scientist’s computers and cameras, the moment the animals touched the water they were gone.”

The story didn’t change Gemma’s mind. There was nothing in her future. Being disappeared was still better than the alternative.

= + =

The familiar tone of her phone’s alarm jostled her from the disrupted sleep that had been all Gemma had managed after saying her good nights to her host. Leaving the crisp, sun-starched linen, she changed out of her flannel sleep pants and cotton t-shirt that still smelt of Tim. Leaving them folded neatly in the top of her overnight bag, her handbag beside it.

Dressed in the clothes she once would have worn on her jogs around the local park, Gemma shuffled out the backdoor of the bed and breakfast into the pre-dawn light. The cold, misty morning made her shiver, but the lake was now only a few feet in front of her. The silvery water lapping gently at the shore. It reminded her of the lake her family had vacations beside when she was a child. The water had always been still on that lake too.

It was inviting and called to her. The shushing of the water sounded like a whisper of her name.

Step by step she walked determinedly towards her future for the first time in two years. Unafraid of what was to come. The chill of the water took a while to soak into her trainers. The lycra of her yoga pants wicked the cold water up her legs quickly. Stopping once the water was lapping at her knees, she wrapped her arms around herself to try and retain a shred of warmth. Eyes closed she waited for fate to meet her.

A hand grabbed her. The points of skeletal fingers pressing painfully into the space between the bones of her ankle. Whoever had her janked her off her feet with one sharp jolt and didn’t stop moving until she was slammed, drowning into the bed of the lake, rocks cutting into her. The little bit of breath she had managed to hold onto was slammed out of her lungs.

A face that she could only see because of the faint bioluminescent glow it was immiting, loomed above her. A shark’s grin in a human face leered at her, watching her stuggle. Watching her drown.

“My favour runs with the water. Following the ebb and flow.” The being said as the last of her life flickered in sparks into the water around them. “The current was strong today.”