The Lake

I was twelve (so young in years and so ancient in spirit) the summer I went with my grandmamma and grandpapa to haunt the house by the lake. Haunt—it’s what some people call disembodied spirits because such souls are known to persist in the places where their bodies died. My stay at the lake took on no portentous connotation until I met my cousin Edgar.

He was fifteen, tall, thin, and the blackness of his hair extended to his eyes, bulbous lenses that wouldn’t have been out of place on any trout in the lake. His mouth was always pursed as if his lips were the pincers of a blacksmith’s clamp. A strange fancy took over my mind: that if he opened his mouth even a fraction more than necessary to ask Grandmamma to pass the butter, his spirit would come flying out in the guise of an enormous black bird. His eyes must be so large because they strained to keep his soul inside his body.

He was beautiful.

Before Cousin Edgar arrived, I stayed with my grandmamma all day, sewing, tending the fire, slicing and chopping for dinner. It held little dissimilarity from life at home in Shenandoah.

But the morning after his arrival, I emerged from my bedroom to find him standing at my door. He turned his head above the black tie and the spare gesture gave me to know that I must follow him wherever he would go.

We crept silently down the stairs and out the back door. I held my new full skirts before me to keep the mud off as we crossed the swampy patch and let them fall to the smooth black stones of the lake’s shore. Edgar picked up a pebble that caught the morning sun with violaceous phosphorescence.

“Amethyst quartz,” he murmured as I leaned in to hear, and he hurled it into the lake, where it disturbed the water’s placid surface for some minutes.

We didn’t remove our gazes from the ripples until they were gone, and I stood the entire time with my shoulder so close to his black suit jacket, I imagined it caused me corporeal pain not to close the distance with an embrace.

“Find another pretty stone and keep it for me,” I said at last.

He turned to walk down the shore, his black boots making the stones sound like dice or checkers on a table top. Within no more than three paces, he bent dramatically at the waist and examined something on the ground.

I neared him and squatted to see that his palm held an amber-colored stone that looked like a kernel of sweet corn.

“Do you like it?” Even with this closeness, I had to use my imagination to make his voice loud enough to hear.

“It’s lovely.”

He held my palm open and dropped the stone into it. “Agate for Agatha. Sweet corn for a sweet cousin.”

When his lips curled up at the sides, I lost my balance with the surprise and fell, but grasped the pebble tight even though the shore stones prodded at my bones.

Edgar held his hands out to me, but before taking them, I slipped the agate into the top of my boot so I wouldn’t lose it. I envied Edgar his jacket and even his black trousers, which had pockets for storing this kind of item, while he drew me up to stand beside him. If we were lovers, this might have been the moment for a first kiss. But I was twelve and we were cousins.

He cleared his throat. “Shall we?” His hand presented the copse behind the lake to me as if it hadn’t been there a moment before.

As we entered the upward-reaching cathedral space between the pines, a hush came over us. The grinding of the lakeshore stones became the muted pat of boots on decaying layers of fallen broadleaves and pine needles.

We were wholly sheltered from the weak sunlight now, and I couldn’t tell whether Edgar and I were the only mammalian creatures in the forest. We might be accompanied by mice, squirrels, or opossum, and I tried to sense their presence, but the close air had a breathtaking melancholy of absence.

A pine cone skittered out before me, and I realized I had kicked it. In surprise, I reached for Edgar’s hand, and he held it fast. We faced each other and stood still, and the space became sacred. I held my breath. Speaking might have broken the gossamer film of the spell we were under.

We looked back toward the lake and the house beyond. Although I knew grandmamma and grandpapa were inside, performing the tasks that sustained their quiet lives, the windows were as hollow eye sockets.

I felt myself to be standing in an empty bubble nothing on Earth could break through. I was all alone, even with silent Edgar beside me, grasping my hand the way one might cradle a butterfly, and my heart fluttered as if it would leave my body and fly away with those loveliest of insects.

Edgar let my hand drop and raised his arms toward the heavens. The branches of the pines moved as if in a mystic dance and seemed alive, even though I knew it must be the wind contorting their limbs. They held within them knowledge a twelve-year-old isn’t privileged to know. Apparently at my cousin’s command, the branches parted, releasing songbirds of every color, which dispersed to the four winds. The heavens opened to reveal a sun too bright to gaze upon. I looked down to find Edgar gone.

I shrieked with the pain of knowing myself to be more alone even than when I’d come into the world—as alone as I will be when I go out of it.

“Don’t shout,” Edgar said. “Come and look.”

I wasn’t alone at all. He crouched only a few pine trunks away.

He showed me a persnickety pile of tiny bleached bones, complete with a ball of grey fur. Who had placed the poor mouse’s remains there?

“An owl must haunt this part of the forest,” said Edgar.

“We should bury them,” I said irrationally. “The mouse needs a proper burial.”

His soft smile came through the weald-covered gloom. I startled like a yearling pony and stood up too fast.

I held my hand out, and when he caught me, I had the embrace I’d longed for all day. His arms and chest enclosed and held me the way the water in a bath closes over my kneecaps, and I never wanted him to release me. I would rather sink until I drowned than rise out of that embrace.

“Perhaps we should go inside,” he whispered. “Dinner will be ready soon.”

His voice in my ear was like poison, a potent acid blistering my insides. We returned to the house beyond the lake. My feet felt like someone else’s feet. They wouldn’t go where I wanted them to, and in the end, I arrived at the doorstep by entrusting my whole weight to Edgar’s arm.

I slept most of the rest of the day, and in the morning, Edgar was silent as usual, but gazed at me over his biscuits. I followed him past the lake and into the forest with only a touch of dizziness to find that he had given the mouse his proper burial among the leaves and mosses. Edgar had made a tiny cross out of sticks and twine and marked the grave at the roots of a pine.

He presented me a bunch of ethereal white wildflowers. I took them and reverently arranged them in a grid pattern over the tiny mound where the mouse rested. A tear fell from my eye to a white petal. I looked to Edgar, and we shared a faint smile because I knew I was safe. As long as he stayed with me, I could fall into no harm.

The next day, and all the others after, we walked into the forest. We never saw another mouse, but owls hid in the treetops, and once a vulture sulked overhead for a short moment that extended through the afternoon.

Sometimes we lingered on the lake shore. Edgar liked to remove his boot and dip a toe in the murky water to see if a trout would think it was a worm.

But I could not approach that water so closely. On days with cloud cover, the water reflected the stones, so still and black, I thought it would draw me under like the ineluctable arrival of night that is thrown upon us all. I scoured the shore for interesting stones, but never found any as lovely as the one Edgar had picked up the first day.

Each night after supper, I climbed into my bed and stared at the agate on my night table until I nodded. The night the full moon streamed in my open window, the agate seemed lit within by a sacred fire. My eyes would not shut.

I stood and looked out toward the lake. Its black surface glittered with frigid moonbeams and although it was still, it seemed to murmur. The pine trees stood, silent sentinels, but somehow, they returned my gaze and the water’s murmurs formed into words, a chant in a foreign language. I understood only that it was beckoning me into its depths.

Before I knew it, I had traveled down the hall, not even wearing slippers, and knocked on the door to Edgar’s room. My nightdress billowed out when he opened the door and placed his cheek lightly on the side of the jamb. His eyes didn’t appear sleepy at all.

“I’m sorry, Edgar. I was looking out my window at the lake and became frightened.” I wanted to ask him if I could sleep in his bed, as if I were still small enough to fit in a corner of sheet and not disturb a sleeping adolescent. I felt the color in my cheeks, as hot as Vulcan’s forge, but I don’t think he could perceive it in the xanthous candlelight.

“May I see it?” he whispered. Looking into those eyes, I thought he was asking to see my soul. “The view from your window.”

He took my hand and I led him on tiptoe over the creaking floorboards back to my window. The moonlight caressed his face as he blinked languidly. Suddenly the lake looked idyllic, the perfect place for adolescent cousins to spend their summer days.

I looked up at Edgar and he murmured the words I hadn’t dared to dream: “May I stay with you for a while, Agatha? I have something to tell you.”

He lay atop the coverlet and swiped the agate from the night table to hold it at different angles in the persistent glare of the moon. Heart pounding, I reclined next to him and lay my head on his shoulder.

“Although you haven’t slept, I’ve had time for a dream. I daresay it was a vision, though I know not whether it was of the past or the future. I hesitate to explain it to you in detail, for you are as delicate a creature as I’ve ever met, and I wouldn’t care to burden you any further when you already seem unduly influenced by some otherworldly force in the lake.”

My skin was all gooseflesh with anticipation of what he would say. I was cold—it was as if my heart no longer pushed the life force through my veins. But I said nothing, and he continued.

“In dreams I walked out to the lake shore, as we do every day, but it was night. There was no moon; the sky was black velvet pierced with diamond stars that shed the faintest light on the pines and stones. But it was enough to show me that a long line of people was headed for the lake. The people varied extraordinarily in height, and suddenly I knew they were children of different ages. I squinted, and it now became apparent that there was commotion in the water. I hadn’t noticed it before because the waves made no lapping sound on the shore. Whatever stirred the water was vigorous but silent.

“I know now what it must be to go blind. I walked closer and closer, but could glean no new information as to who the children were or what strange event they marched toward in the lake. And suddenly the moon arrived as if it had been on the other side of the world and reconsidered, casting its glow in nearly the same way the real moon illuminates us now.”

He looked into my eyes, and I, dazzled by so many and such strange words from my silent cousin, had to force myself to look away.

“Agatha, all the children were girls. They all had auburn hair plaited to both sides the way you wear yours. The children marching, so orderly, were you. Somehow, you held hands with each version of yourself all along the chain. As each girl stepped into the lake, the one in front pulled her deeper and the one behind followed to catch the same fate moments later. The commotion deep in the water, the flailing and wave-making that progressed more quietly than our recent trip down the hall, it was a woman holding each version of you underwater until you breathed no more. She never seemed satisfied. As soon as one of you drowned, she reached for the hair of the next you. She might have gone on this way for hours, but I took a fright and woke myself just before you knocked on my door.

“The woman must have been nearly forty years old. She was also you.”

I fixed my gaze toward the ceiling, which vanished outside the moonbeams. “I was drowning younger versions of myself in your dream?”

“Yes. But I would yet hesitate to call it a dream.”

“What was it, then?”

“A portent. A revelation of things past or of things yet to come.” He grasped my shoulder awkwardly, as if I were planning to leap from the bed and hurl myself out the window into the lake.

“But what does it mean?”

He kissed my lips for a single moment, the sort of peck you might give a young child’s cheek or a good dog’s forehead. But it was as if my body disintegrated under the power of his touch. He sat up and left my bedroom without saying anything else. I didn’t know then as I do now that he must save his words for his verse, stories, and belles lettres. It would be wastage to use his words speaking.

I had a strong desire to follow him, but my muscles had dissolved. I fell asleep feeling as if I had become a thin layer of dust on the coverlet.

The next morning at breakfast, grandmamma told grandpapa and me that Edgar had to return to Richmond. An important military commander was making an official visit, and Edgar must prepare because he was lieutenant in the youth honor guard. I stopped smoothing the knife over my toast, even though lumps of butter tottered over the milled grains.

“Will he come back afterward? He could stay with us and leave for Richmond the day before the commander’s visit, but come back the same day after the honor guard.”

My mind cycled through the possibilities without my bidding while my consciousness was consumed by the fact that I could not live by the lake without Edgar. He was the only thing standing between me and utter solitude, or even certain death by drowning.

But he did leave. He employed few words in his farewell, but before he headed out to catch a coach to Richmond, he embraced me as if he knew it would be for the last time. The hug lasted longer than those he granted either of our grandparents, so long, in fact, that Grandpapa cleared his throat. It was perfectly as long as I needed in order to carry Edgar’s muted, strange love for me through the rest of my days in the house by the lake.

When I returned home that autumn a quarter of a century ago, I held the agate close to my breast. It never left me, whether hidden in a drawer, sewn into a seam, or catching the moonlight on a different bedside table. I completed the eighth grade and helped my mother keep the house for my father and brothers with only the tiny stone to remind me of another world. Soon after, Mamma and Papa passed away.

The officer who earned my affections and whom I would’ve married was killed on the Mexican border. Edgar married his other cousin, much younger than either of us, and I wept again. The explorer who promised me many things upon his return from Antarctica never did. I longed for the lake’s stark solitude in place of such a dull ache.

Then, the worst news was all over the papers, full of libelous imputations—Edgar’s last moments and death in Baltimore.

And so I’ve returned to haunt the house by the lake alone. Only the agate keeps vigil at my bedside, a seed cast on hard ground, never given a chance to take root. Each night I look out at the black stones and the placid surface of the water and know that I’ve found Eden, for the short weeks I spent here with Edgar so long ago were the happiest of my life. The horror of this place has gone, dispersed through the world to take the life of every person I ever loved.

When next the moon is full and makes the water gleam, I shall walk to the lake. I shall make my home under the dim water. No one on Earth shall know where I’ve gone.