LAKE

 If you've never lived with a huge body of water at your back, you'll never really 'get' the Great Lakes. People from outside the region think they're just like any of their friendly little local lakes, and they're wrong. They are a sea unto themselves. They are massive living things. You hear old sailors talk about their awe of the ocean, the reverence for its indifferent violence, for its depths. The ocean is our mother, where we grew our first lungs and legs to leave her, and when we return still thinking of the woman who raised us, we are confronted with a stranger. Part of being human is to forget and then learn all at once again, the cruelty of water.

I live on the eastern side of Lake Michigan. My childhood home is right on the water. We get some of the worst rip currents in the Lakes system, when the wind planes over the water in such a way that the tide sucks you down into it. Everybody knows someone who’s drowned or almost drowned- mostly kids. For my part, I know a lot of drowners.

I hate it here. I truly do. You hear that from most people who get trapped in their hometowns all their lives, but I think I’m more entitled to my resentment than most.

I couldn’t have been older than 6, so I don’t remember much of it, but when I was little I drowned. Most of the time when that happens, it’s kids who don’t know better, goofing off near a sandbar and getting pulled under. You see, the rip current makes the surface of the water go smooth, and especially on the Lake where the water is always choppy, it makes a tempting sight for a child who isn’t the strongest swimmer. I wasn’t. I liked the water at that age, according to my mother, but what I would really do is go and splash around in it with my arm floaters on. I couldn't have ever been prepared.

What does stick in my mind was the moment it happened. I was running over to my friend Cathy through what looked like shallow, calm water, and when I went to put my foot down, the Lake decided to take me. Currents are stronger the deeper you go. I remember the undertow yanking me down, doing somersaults in the dark. I’d screamed before going down, so my mouth was open to receive every ounce of Lake that could fit into me.

Obviously, they pulled me out and squeezed all the water out of me. I lived, but at a cost. I have chronic pneumonia; I’m physically weaker than other women my age due to lung and nerve damage. I stayed out of the water for a long time.

The first time I knew for sure I had to get out of here, I was 14. Being sick from a young age makes you realize things that don't normally settle in for most people until their 50s: being born is a death sentence and my body is falling apart. I tried not to be a downer with other people, because I already had enough trouble at school being the cripple kid, but it did give me an early appreciation for psychoactives.

I was friends with Henry because his older brother had cheap weed, and he was good for edibles. For obvious reasons, I tried not to smoke.

We would walk around town high as hell, go down to the shore and kick litter around in the weeds. Sometimes a group of us, sometimes just me and him. In my memory, it wasn't so much that we were particularly close. Kids just pick people to hang around. I think he liked that I laughed at his stupid jokes; the pot made me giggly.

It was dead summer, muggy air and Michigan mosquitoes. The only place you could go to get away from the heat was by the water where the rolling breeze kept you cool. We had a little spot, a patch of shore where the reeds and yellow grass didn't encroach on the sand. Weeds rippled beneath the waves like tiny grasping hands.

"It's too god damn hot," Henry said for the too-manynth time, like I hadn't heard my dad say the same thing all week.

"It's the global warming," I replied. He was further down the shore, close to the lapping water. I'd sat up on a log with my cane on my lap, watching the sand fleas. "It was never this hot when we were little."

"You remember that?"

"I'd remember it getting to be 99 degrees outside."

"You would maybe. I can't even remember what I ate this morning."

I rolled my eyes at him. "Yeah, well, you wouldn't."

He grinned back at me over his shoulder, plucking at his sweaty shirt. I was tired in that soft, slow, wispy way, between being high out of my mind and being baked much more literally by the August sun. I remember thinking he was going to ask me to be his girl. That it had been leading up to this. I wouldn't have minded; maybe even wanted it a little.

He didn't. Henry pulled off his shirt and threw it at me and said, "You sure you don't want to come?"

I told him yes, I was sure. I bundled up his shirt in my arms. He shrugged and jumped in. The dark water of the shallows splashed like an actual cannonball had fallen in. Henry didn't come back up.

Unable to comprehend, I watched the spot for a while. How long could Henry hold his breath? He shouldn't have been able to sink very deep from where we were on the shore. I knew something was wrong, and the longer I sat there staring, the worse it would get, but I couldn't will my body to move. My body was heavy with dread, with the oppressive weight of being stoned.

I woke up there. Or, not quite there. I woke up in the water, soaked up to my shoulders by an incoming wave. Henry's shirt was still balled up in my hands, turned from orange to bloody red by the tide. 

I looked around for him and saw nothing but weedy beach all around. I dropped his shirt and left it there; even moving my leg hurt, and I needed all my strength to brace against the pain on the walk home. My shoes were heavy with water the whole way. A dark red bruise circled my ankle, like a ligature or grasping hand.

His parents and the local cops organized a search, and they knew I was probably the last to see him, so I lied and said we'd split up on the way home. I said maybe he went back to the shore. When I remembered that shirt, it felt like a godsend; I got to tell them that he went back for it and I walked home alone, and they found it right there on our patch of Lake. 

I don't know why. I don't know why I lied, except that I thought I'd go to jail or something for not helping. Like it would be my fault that I couldn't go in after him. Anyway, they fished him out eventually. It looked like he'd gotten tangled up in seaweed and drowned himself trying to get free. If it gets wrapped around your ankle and you try to tug yourself out, it'll only tie tighter and drag you down.

My parents knew something was wrong. For dad, this manifested as concern. Checking up on me, trying to take me to movies on the weekend. You know, dad stuff. For my mother, she became clingy. She was religious. She went out to the Lake every morning to pray; she'd been baptized in these waters, and so had I, and Christ would wash away our sins and blah blah. Getting me to come and pray with her became her mission for the rest of summer, so she could wash away the unholiness that had settled upon me. I didn't go.

My dad was always really supportive. I mean, he got it. He wasn’t local like my mother; she’d lived in the same area basically her whole life, while he’d moved around everywhere before settling down with her. We were really close. He took me to my physical therapy and piano, and we watched movies together when I was sick, on my side with my chest and throat coated in Vick's and him bringing us hot tea and ginger soup. He helped me write my college essays and when I got a full ride to a university out of state (it doesn't matter anymore where or for what) he couldn't have been prouder. Neither of my parents had gone to college. He kept telling me I was really going to make something of myself.

He drove me down there and moved me into my dorm while my mother sulked at home. I remember I was on edge the whole time in a way I couldn't explain. It was a smell. Landlocked, but the whole time he was helping me take my stuff inside, I could smell brine. I thought something of mine had gotten wet somehow and gotten mildewed.

Dad didn't notice anything. I didn't bring it up to him, thought he would worry and it would mess this up for us both. It was already so hard to leave.

He gathered me up close in the parking lot as I was walking him out and he asked me: "You feel ready, junebug?"

I said I did. He went home, and that wet smell went with him. Maybe it was in the car, or on his clothes, I thought.

He was a strong swimmer. He loved the water. He never would have done something as stupid as jumping into the Lake in the middle of the night. I got the call three weeks into my first semester, telling me he'd washed to shore a little ways down the coast.

I had to drop out; my mother was inconsolable and needy, and it was soon enough in the semester to cancel without any penalties. Next year, I promised myself. I had plenty of time.

Next year turned into the year after that. Then I was halfway through my 20s. It was never the right time, my mother always needed me, financially or emotionally. I got a job in town, of course, got a cheap car like a token attempt at independence. She couldn't make me go to church or wake up at sunrise any more than she could when I was a child, but even if she gave up on my soul, she wouldn't give up on my wallet.

My life was a dim, algae-creeping malaise before I met Mitch. I worked at the back office of a gardening supply company, and he was our mail guy every Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday. He came by the office window in the afternoons and chatted me up while I got the overnight shipping together for him. I'd forgotten how it felt to meet someone; not just exist in their proximity, but to be with them.

Work chats became shared lunch breaks, Sunday coffee dates, movies, driving out to the city to find a nice restaurant. Mitch was a gentleman. He liked fishing and chick flicks. He didn't look at me like a lame dog in the road when I went out with crutches.

Both of us together couldn't afford a place of our own, and he couldn't get me on the lease with his roommates even if I had wanted him to. When we got married, he said to me once, we'd have our own place if he had to build it himself. That was his way of proposing- lobbing it up in the air for me to take as I might. I said I'd hold the nails for him.

But there was still the issue of water between us. The first time he stayed at my mother's house, at my house, it was on the verge of a summer storm. A hurricane had come down on the east coast, and we were bound to feel the ripples of it. How many storms had I lived through until now? I just had a feeling about this one, this dread, this briny smell in my nose all day as the clouds stifled the sky. Like an idiot, I asked Mitch to stay the night.

He met my mother. She hated him.

He dragged my queen bed out from the wall so we could both climb in, and left the window cracked. For tornadoes, he said, for the air pressure. With the window open even a little, the storm's wailing came right inside. Rain and wind, rattling the trees and the pier.

“Looks like it's getting bad out there. Could be the big one,” he teased. I told him I didn’t find it funny. I didn't want to think about what might happen.

He kissed my head and apologized.

Sleep stole my memories. I don't know how I got to rest at all with the storm howling the way it did, knowing the Lake was right outside and leaping up to meet me. I remember a lot of things from that night so perfectly, but I don't remember my dream. It was only as I was surfacing from the dark that I heard his voice.

He whispered to me, just on the verge of awareness: "You sure you don't want to come?"

I woke up with something wrapped around my ankle. It was too cold to be a tongue. I couldn’t process it so soon after waking, and just pulled my foot away by instinct, still half asleep. The cold wet thing dragged over my foot and off my skin. There was a noise then. Some kind of… I don’t know, a hiss or a sigh. It was quick and quiet and sounded like air between gritted teeth or the squeak of a window being shut fast. It jolted me awake.

Pulse speeding up, I stared around. In the dark, scattered with cloud-choked moonlight, nothing seemed real. No more noises; total silence. I rubbed my ankle and shivered. My skin was cold to the touch. Was it always so dark at night?

I braced a foot on the floor, anxious to hit the light, and yanked my leg back up, cursing- “Fuck!” Wet rug. I tried again and stood up, head swimming. The floor was soaking. Were we flooding somehow? Had the storm raised the Lake to my doorstep to swallow me? I stumbled across the floor, splashing through a thin puddle on the hardwood until I could get to the lightswitch. Skidding, I slammed into the wall and fumbled for the light, and there was still nothing but the dark and wet. My vision went sideways and I hit the ground.

My head whistled past the bedside drawer and barely missed cracking my skull open in the dark. I was yelling for Mitch, groping around for the silhouette of the bed and struggling just to get to my feet. 

I found the sheets and they were squishy, waterlogged. I couldn't tell the difference at first between them and his skin. That's when I started screaming. I'm so grateful that I couldn't see him, because he felt like I could tear through his skin like a swollen pepper.

My mother found me scrambling around blind for my inhaler. The crying had choked me until instinct kicked in.

She pointed a flashlight in my face. Behind that beam of light, she was a faceless god putting me on trial. She grabbed my arm and shook me.

"You went to bed alone," she kept saying. "He went out to the pier to fish before the storm came in. Do you understand? You went to bed early waiting for him to come inside. Are you listening to me?"

I was listening. I didn't know why she was coaching me. I was suffocating on my own fluids and she wouldn't let me use my inhaler.

The interrogation finally stopped, and the light moved on. She left me curled up in the dark to take my medicine. His body thumped when it hit the carpet, and again I thought about rotten vegetables, the sound an overripe melon makes when it liquefies and splits. Lucky for her my bedroom was on the ground floor, to spare me the stairs. I coughed myself sideways and laid there for god knows how long before she came back. She dragged me to the couch and told me to stay there while she took care of things.

She always took care of things. The police took one look at me when they came around, my feeble little body and swollen, wet face, and they said, well. Ain't it a tragedy.

I hated her. She hovered around in the doorway watching for any sign of betrayal and I knew it was her. She had taken Mitch and dad and somehow she had taken Henry. She had taken me, too small to understand, and trapped me in this body I hated and this town I despised. I knew it. I knew her.

I wished the Lake would take her.

And then it did.

Seven A.M., visiting with the water as per routine. I looked up when I heard her yelp, like she'd been bitten. She was already on her side in the sand. A dark, shiny thing had her leg in its grip. Her eyes only had a second to bulge at me, hateful. Then she slid into the water with barely a splash.

I didn't quit my job. I didn't talk to anybody. I threw a handful of clothes in my back seat and left.

I felt like the girl from Psycho, you know, at the beginning of the movie. Guilty runner, nowhere to run to. And then, fuck, at the southern edge of Illinois the rain started back up again. I pulled over to a motel and stayed the night.

The sound of the shower woke me up. The drumbeat of water on the tile, like sheets of rain. I lay frozen in bed, heaped with cheap hotel duvets, staring at the bathroom door. It had been left open a crack, golden light pouring into my dark room; I could see wisps of steam curling in the sliver of light, making the air taste wet.

More than anything, I wanted to go back to sleep. Of course I was afraid. But it was a numb fear, the kind that comes over you without even the decency to give you a shot of adrenaline. What else could I do? I’d already run away, and it had found me here. Might as well roll over and get some sleep.

I forced myself upright, trying not to creak the bed or rustle the sheets too loudly. The shitty carpet squished wetly between my toes. Flooded. Yes, now I could see the water pouring slowly out from under the bathroom door, sloshing out from an overflowing tub.

The Lake was there. I couldn’t make out anything distinct behind the bubble glass of the shower door and the steam fog gathered on it. Just a dark shape, rendered deep algae green by the barren fluorescent light, rising and falling with breaths drowned out by the patter of the shower water.

It hadn't taken me. I was here, and it hadn't taken me. It never had. No matter how much it wanted to.

"Hello?" I said stupidly, not sure what else to say.

It rumbled a bit before it spoke.

"You feel ready, junebug?" it asked with my dad's voice. With my mother's, it asked, "Do you understand?"

I was. I did.

We came to an agreement, the Lake and I.