Chapter Seven

chapter seven

June 17, 2019

Istarted to clean up the kitchen the next morning. In the bright light of day, my middle-of-the-night fears seemed silly—I shook my head as I remembered creeping around the dark house imagining banshees. The power wasn’t out after all; the outlets in the kitchen worked fine and the fridge was humming. I made myself a cup of espresso. It was burnt tasting, bitter and thick. I tried the kitchen lights and, when they didn’t come on, further inspection revealed missing bulbs. I checked the closet where our grandma had always kept the household supplies, but didn’t find any. Pig stalked into the kitchen and let out an angry meow, so I dumped another can of tuna onto a plate. There was no sign of cat food anywhere.

It looked like it had been weeks since Lexie had done the dishes. She’d gone through all the everyday ones and had moved on to the good china. Our grandmother’s delicate floral-rimmed plates were chipped and hosting broken crackers and shriveled bits of cheese. The kitchen smelled. I tried opening the Dutch door that led out to the patio, thinking fresh air and sunshine would be nice, but it wouldn’t budge. Looking more closely, I saw that metal brackets had been screwed in, sealing the door to the frame.

“Why on earth would you do that?” I asked, half expecting Lexie to give me some cockamamie explanation involving feng shui.

To the left of the Dutch door was a black rotary phone that had been there my entire life. The one Lexie had no doubt been calling me from before she drowned: Answer the fucking phone, Jax! I know you’re there. I can feel you listening.

Next to the phone was a wall calendar. I looked at June, then flipped back to May. Therapist and doctors’ appointments, a car tune-up, dental cleaning, lunch with Diane, dinner with Ryan. My sister had been having dinner with Ryan, when I didn’t even know he was back in town.

I remembered young Ryan with his halo of curly red hair, who’d show up at Sparrow Crest on his blue ten-speed, ready to follow Lexie on whatever adventure she had in store for us. One year, they spent the entire summer searching the woods for a peacock. Gram, Terri, Randy, Aunt Diane, Uncle Ralph, Ryan, and I had all been sitting on the patio by the pool. It was a hot day, but no one was swimming, just trying to stay cool by being near the water. The adults were having cocktails. I was playing Go Fish with Ryan. I always won when I played with him—he was so easy to read, I could tell what cards he had just by watching his face. Lexie came tearing in, sweaty and scratched up, saying she’d seen a peacock in the woods. She’d chased him to the top of Devil’s Hill, then lost him in the thick brush up there. Her hair was wild, and she was talking fast and loud as she told us her story.

The adults had laughed. “What on earth would a peacock be doing way back there?” Aunt Diane asked.

“Maybe it was a grouse?” Uncle Ralph suggested. “Or a wild turkey?”

“It was a peacock,” Lexie insisted. “He fanned his tail and everything.”

“A male turkey can fan its tail, too,” Ryan’s dad said.

It was just like Lexie, I thought, to see an ugly old Tom turkey and turn it into something beautiful.

“I’m not an idiot,” she said. “I know what a turkey looks like. What I saw was a peacock. And I’m going to catch him. I’ll do it on my own if none of you believe me.” She turned to walk away.

“I believe you,” Ryan said, setting down his cards, forgetting all about our game. Lexie stopped, turned back, and smiled at him.

“I’ll help you catch it,” he said. And I hated him a little then.

milkcoffeecheeselong nails and screws*Ask Bill about night vision camera—motion activated? infrared?The fridge was nearly empty—a carton of spoiled milk, a lidless pot of congealed soup, an empty container of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, a few shriveled limes, and ancient condiments. I found half a box of stale graham crackers in one of the cupboards and nibbled on them as I picked up.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that Lexie was in the house, that she was just upstairs and would come down at any minute, hair disheveled, pajamas wrinkled. She’d sit down at the table, look around at the kitchen, and say, “Spick and span, Jax.”

I swept the floor, the broom pulling out another sheet of notebook paper from under the table. I bent down to grab it.

June 1

Something’s in the water

I froze, heart thudding in my ears. Then, slowly, I turned and looked out the kitchen window at the pool. The surface was still and black, like a great piece of polished onyx. I pulled the curtain closed so I didn’t have to look anymore and went back to sweeping.

Once the kitchen was in some semblance of order, I headed for the living room. Pig followed at a safe distance, watching with curiosity. A quick check confirmed that all the light bulbs in there had been removed, too. In fact, some of them were not removed but smashed, the metal socket still in place along with a ring of jagged broken glass. I picked up all the dishes and cups in the living room and brought them into the kitchen. Then I started on the papers and family photos pulled from old albums. They were scattered everywhere.

Hurricane Lexie.

I studied the odd code I had noticed yesterday. A date and time with coordinates of some kind, measurements. F6: 6/9 11:05 p.m.—over 50 meters! I began to stack the loose pages in a pile on the coffee table, glancing at words Lexie had scrawled: 6/10: They don’t like the light. They won’t come when the lights are on. Christ. Was she feeding animals? Or having out-and-out hallucinations? It wasn’t unheard of when her mania was at its peak. I tried to put them in chronological order the best I could. Not every entry was dated, and some were hardly legible. One read: Ask Diane about Rita’s imaginary friend, Martha. Call Jax and ask if she remembers any stories Mom told about Rita (especially anything about Rita and Martha!).

Lexie had never asked me. She would have been disappointed anyway—I didn’t have any stories to share. Mom didn’t speak about Rita. Not to me.

I reached for a paper dated June 12, five days ago:

I know what I saw. I am not crazy. This was no hallucination. I think it came out of the water.

I shook my head. Then I spotted a little square of pink paper stuck under the leg of the coffee table. I pulled it out: She isn’t who she says sheis. I held the paper, fingers trembling, remembering what Declan had told me about the fish: They weren’t who they said they were. They’d turned into something else.

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I added the paper to the stack I’d made on the coffee table and reached for the next bunch. I grabbed a scattering of photocopied pages: a survey of Sparrow Crest and the surrounding property; tax records; a drawing of Brandenburg from 1865, with each property lot carefully marked—the land and springs had belonged to a man named Nelson DeWitt. There was an old map and deed from 1929 showing the location of the Brandenburg Springs Hotel and Resort, owned by Mr. Benson Harding. I found an old tattered paperback book: The History of Brandenburg, Vermont.

My sister’s research hadn’t been just about our family, but our family home, land, and town as well. There were pages and pages of journal entries, and I knew I’d never get through picking up if I stopped to read each one, so I just put them all into a pile. Some of them had neat, careful cursive; some were written in messy, hurried, childish scrawl—the way Lexie wrote when she was sick. It seemed she’d been incredibly prolific over these last months: hundreds of pages of notes and journal entries, many about the springs, the pool, the hotel, our family.

One scrap of paper dated May 27 was just a list of names:

Nelson DewittMartha W.Eliza HardingRita HarknessThe last journal entry I picked up did not have a date.

I remember what Grandma always told people when they asked her why she didn’t have the pool filled in after Rita drowned; how she could bear to watch her children, then grandchildren continue to swim in that water; how she could possibly still swim there herself. “Rita loved the pool,” Gram would tell them. “It’s where I feel closest to her. When I’m in the water, I feel like she’s still with me.”

My eyes went over the last line again and again, until, with a trembling hand, I set the paper down on the pile I’d made on the coffee table. The papers stood in tall, messy stacks, but at least they were up off the floor. I’d go out and get some three-ring binders and do a better job at organizing them later.

I picked up the book of town history again. It was published in 1977 by the Town of Brandenburg Bicentennial Committee. The typesetting was terrible, the photographs grainy. It looked more like some kid’s middle school project than an actual book. I opened it to the first chapter, where Lexie had left a pink sticky note as a bookmark and underlined a passage.

In 1792, when the first settlers, led by Reverend Thomas Alcott, arrived in what is now Brandenburg, they found it had been settled once before. The remains of a village long abandoned were clear—a small gathering of half a dozen cabins, pastures cleared for planting, overgrown gardens, and trash: broken bottles, clay jars, piles of bones from deer and small game. At the heart of this little village was the spring, a small bubbling pool of dark water. And there, at the edge of the spring, Thomas Alcott and his group found a rock, a broken piece of granite about the size of a man’s arm. On it was carved: prendre garde.

One of the men in the party translated: beware.

I tossed the book down, stood up, and walked away, turning my back on it.

In the center of the living room, I stood, taking deep breaths, then looked out the window, past my own reflection. I knew what I had to do next. The thing I’d been avoiding since I arrived. I walked down the hall, out the front door, and into the yard. The grass looked like it hadn’t been mown at all this year. The air hummed with the low drone of buzzing insects. I followed the path of stone pavers to the side of the house, to the gate. I undid the latch; the door screeched open. I forced myself through.

The pool was there, waiting for me; the water dark as ink. A huge, unblinking pupil.

I imagined Lexie there, floating facedown and naked. My mind went to all sorts of places: Had she been close enough to the edge for Diane to pull her out without having to jump in? Where were her clothes? They were details that didn’t matter, things I knew I would never ask Diane, but my mind was stuck on them, spinning in circles, trying to picture it, trying to make it feel more real.

When I’m in the water, I feel like she’s still with me.

The water from the natural spring that fed the pool was colder than any water I’ve experienced, before or since. The carved granite stones along the edge were stained green, spotted with moss. I could hear the water flowing through the spillway, down the canal that ran across the yard, to the stream and river. Lexie said once, “Water from our pool flows all the way to the ocean—fish out in the Atlantic are tasting the water from our little spring!”

I stared at it now, the surface perfectly still; a black mirror. Our grandmother always told us it was bottomless.

“Could I swim to the other side of the world?” Lexie asked when she was nine.

“If you could hold your breath that long, then yes, I suppose you could, Alexia.”

“You’d die if you held your breath that long,” I warned.

That whole summer, and every summer after, my sister practiced holding her breath and diving down into the darkest part of the water.

“It’s stupid, you know,” I told her. “You can’t really swim to the other side of the world.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because I just know. And you should, too. You’re the one who gets straight As in science.

“So?”

“So the earth has layers of rock and at the center there’s a fiery core—even I know that.”

She gave me this pitying look and dove back under.

She said sometimes, when she was deep, it was hard to tell which way was up. But she never managed to touch the bottom. And she never got to the other side of the world.

“Until now,” I said to the pool.

My chest felt empty and hollow, my limbs impossibly heavy. If I were to fall into the water, I knew I would sink down, down, down. Tears blurred my vision, matching the rich, mineral smell to the damp air.

Before my great-grandfather built the house, Gram used to say, people used to come to the springs to bathe and drink, and claimed the water had healing, even magical properties. They came before the hotel was built, and then, once the hotel went up, they came by the trainful.

Some people said the magic was good, but some stories we heard in town, passed down over generations, warned that the springs were cursed: If you came to the water looking for a miracle, you had to be prepared to pay a price. When we asked Gram about these stories, she laughed and said they were nonsense, even gently boxed our ears and warned us not to listen to such tall tales.

“Maybe it was the curse that killed poor Aunt Rita,” Lexie hypothesized when we were alone.

Cursed or not, people still believed that the water healed. A constant stream of visitors came to Sparrow Crest each summer: ladies Gram knew from church, old friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. They wanted a quick swim or to fill bottles, swearing the water helped their arthritis, their headaches, their gout. Sometimes, we’d hear the visitors whispering to the water, talking to it like it was a living thing. They’d leave little gifts, too. I’d seen an old man dumping brandy into the water, and Gram’s friend Shirley leaving flower petals scattered over the surface.

It seemed silly to me, but Lexie really believed that the water might have some kind of power. She said we should each drink the water every day, just a few sips so our magical abilities could surface.

“How will we know if it’s changing us?” I asked.

“Maybe we won’t. The biggest changes happen so slowly you hardly notice them.”

The water tasted like burnt matches and old rocks. Sometimes we’d find dead frogs floating, and I imagined that’s what the water tasted like: the green skin of the ones who weren’t able to get themselves back out. I looked around now but saw no frogs, thankfully. We’d snuck down to the pool at night to tell it our wishes, too. Lexie had wished to be a better swimmer, and me, I’d wished for a terrible thing.

I blinked away the memory, looked over the pool and across the yard where Lord’s Hill and Devil’s Hill loomed like sleeping giants, casting long shadows, the trees so dark green they looked black.

A yellow-and-blue inflatable raft drifted, unmoored, at the far end of the pool. Two wooden lounge chairs were on the stone patio. There was a wrought iron table full of glasses, some half-full. Other objects were scattered around the edge of the pool—a box of crackers, a plate with bread crusts, an ashtray with the remains of several joints, mason jars, a coil of rope, an empty wine bottle, a blue nylon bag that had held the inflatable raft. And a box of spilled crayons—the big, fat kind, like the ones I kept in my office and pulled out for the youngest children.

I soon saw what Lexie had been using the crayons for: The stones around the edge of the pool had markings on them, in multiple colors. Letters along the short edge of the pool (A through T), and numbers along the long edge (1 to 45), evenly spaced at about a foot apart and separated by short, roughly drawn lines. A grid. Lexie had been studying the pool.

I walked around to the other side to get a better look at the raft. There were plastic oars inside it, and a net. And a long coil of rope with markings on it. I looked closer—not rope. It was more like an oversized, super sturdy measuring tape, with meters and tenths of a meter marked in red and black, up to 50 meters. A small loop at one end had a metal weight tied to it, a bit bigger than a golf ball and teardrop-shaped.

Now Lexie’s coded messages made sense: She was measuring the depth of the pool using the grid and weighted measuring rope. But why? I shook my head. Trying to explain Lexie’s behaviors with logic was a losing battle. My phone rang, the sudden noise and vibration from my back pocket making me jump. I’d forgotten I’d tucked it back there. I pulled out my phone and looked at the screen. Karen Hurst, the social worker helping out with my clients while I was away.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Hi, Jackie. I’m so, so sorry to bother you at a time like this, but I’ve got a bit of a crisis here. Apparently, Declan Shipee went into school today and dumped a gallon of bleach into a fish tank full of trout? His teacher tried to stop him; he threw bleach on her, got some in her eyes.”

“Oh Jesus, no,” I said. “He called me yesterday and left a message. He sounded… off. But I’ve been so caught up in stuff here, I haven’t had a chance to call him back. How’s his teacher?”

“She’s going to be okay. No permanent damage. Sounds like he’s burned his bridges at the school, though—they’ve asked him not to return. Declan’s mom came and got him. I spoke with her over the phone. She’s furious and blaming the school for what happened.”

“She’s fiercely protective of Declan, to the point of denial sometimes.”

“I’m seeing Declan first thing tomorrow,” Karen said. “I’ve been going over your notes in his file to get a little background. Other than the heads-up about his mom, do you have any additional thoughts or advice?”

I thought of Declan’s drawing again, his nightmare fish. They weren’t who they said they were. “He’s really into animals and nature; that’s always been a door in. I’ve got a bunch of field guides and nature books in my office. But, Karen, he loved those fish. I saw him on Friday, and he told me he’d had a nightmare about them—but we talked through it and he seemed okay.” Had I missed something? Had I been too cranky and headachy to deal with the situation as I should have? “Damn it,” I said. “I should have called him back when I got his message yesterday.”

I looked at the raft on the water and noticed a piece of paper next to it, drifting. It was a folded paper boat, like something a child would make.

The things in dreams, they can follow you into real life.

I walked toward the far end of the pool, where the little boat was floating.

“You’ve got enough to deal with there,” she said. “Leave Declan to me.”

“Call me after you see you him, okay?”

“I don’t want to keep bothering you, Jackie,” she said. “How are you holding up?”

Lexie and I made little paper boats like that and sent them down the canal that flowed to the stream. She’d write messages inside them, hoping they would get carried far away, be picked up by a stranger who would read: I’m being held prisoner, send help, please! This is a note from the other side of the world. Everything is upside down here.

“I’m doing okay, all things considered. And it’s fine. I’d really appreciate an update tomorrow.”

I ended the call as I crept up to the edge of the pool, got down on my knees on the damp stone, and reached to grab the paper boat. It was made from lined notebook paper with three holes along the edge—there were words visible through the damp page. I carefully unfolded it and saw the message scribbled in green crayon in what appeared to be my sister’s handwriting: Why didn’t you pick up the phone?

I dropped the paper, watched it flutter back down into the pool. And just at that moment, I was dead sure I caught a glimpse of something in the water—a shifting shadow, a trick of light—and for a half a second, I expected Lexie to come bursting out of the water, gasping for breath, saying she still hadn’t touched bottom.