A House at the Bottom of a Lake

35

Amelia at home. On the couch. Thinking.

She thought a lot in the days following the final events at the house. She believed she knew what happened and why. But that was part of the problem: She was sick of asking why.

On one particularly motivated morning, she actually looked into it. Tried to find some information about the house. About the lake. A house at the bottom of a lake, she believed, must have a trail. Yet there was nothing. No images, no stories, no rumors. And with every dead end she met, she experienced a little relief. If nobody else had a story about the house… didn’t that mean that, in a way, it still belonged to Amelia and James? And if they never talked about it with anybody else, if they forever kept their secret, wouldn’t it always remain theirs and theirs alone?

But that was the thing. One of the things. Many things. She wanted to talk about it with everybody she spoke to. Wanted to tell her parents. Tell her friends that she hadn’t been seen all summer because she was stuck on a boy, stuck on a raft tethered to a house in a lake. Stuck. Snagged. Trapped. She had to physically hold her mouth shut when her childhood friend Karrie called to ask how she’d been. Karrie knew something was amiss. Amelia could hear it in Karrie’s questions. But there was no way Karrie could guess what it was, and so Amelia wasn’t afraid. A drug addict might sniff. An alcoholic might smack her dry lips into the phone. But what did somebody who was stuck on a house sound like?

As long as nobody knew what it was, nobody could take it from her.

All this, Amelia believed, was too much thinking. Way too much thinking. And yet what else was she supposed to do? The house had vanished, leaving her and James floating in an empty lake, no more magical than any other lake in the world, except this one had been different; this one once harbored a house and in that house…

What?

Amelia closed her eyes.

James.

How was James?

They spoke in the few days following the final event at the house but it wasn’t easy stuff. Both of them sounded dazed. There was too much space between their words. Long pauses at the end of their sentences. As if something was slowing them down, stretching their syllables, muting their meaning.

As if they were still talking underwater.

Amelia didn’t tell James that she’d been hearing that same muted elongation everywhere. And that the doors in her house took longer to close than they should. Some seemed to sway shut on their own.

She opened her eyes.

James.

How was James?

They stopped talking after the first few days because it was just too weird. How many times could they say that was incredible, that was insane, what do we do now, what do we do now, what do we do now that we’ve experienced the apex of adventure and now have to face boring life ever after?

And how many times could they skirt the real issue, how freaky it had been, how unbelievably scary?

They didn’t hang out. No spontaneous trips to the third lake. No scuba classes. No kisses. No firsts in a fully furnished house underwater.

How long had it been?

Ten days? Two weeks?

Amelia wasn’t sure.

She checked her phone and saw nobody had called. Nobody had texted. Good. That way she didn’t have to hold her mouth shut, didn’t have to swallow the words that crawled up her throat, a description of the house, a recounting of the wonder that almost swallowed her whole.

We found a dangerously magic place. A place to fall in love.

She stared at the end of the couch, where she thought she saw the cushions ripple, for a moment, blurred by a mask she wasn’t wearing, bubbles she didn’t breathe.

But we lost it. And we don’t know where it went.

Amelia shook these words out of her head. She turned on the television and felt sick with every image she saw. It all felt so practiced, so dry compared with what she and James had found.

And then lost.

She turned off the television. She closed her eyes.

James.

How was James now?