The Beastly Bride

ISLAND LAKE E. Catherine Tobler

Viewed from the dock, the old tree of the island appears to be a woman, branches curving down, as if she holds a child. Everyone calls it the Madonna tree, though it only looks like such from our dock. From the opposite shore of the lake, it looks like a tree caving in on itself.

Father used the Madonna tree to teach me and my sister Laura about perspective, about how something looks different from every angle; different too depending on whose eyes are doing the looking.

My sister looks at the tree and sees a jumping fish, mouth pointing north, evergreens as mad, frothy water. She calls it her Madonna fish. I look and I see the Madonna but wonder if I see her because I honestly do, or because I have been taught to.

Laura’s teeth left long scores across the apple’s golden flesh, juice dribbling down her chin. She wiped it away and narrowed her brown eyes upon me.

“Perhaps today, wee Lizzie,” she said.

I stretched in the afternoon sun, the splintered dock beneath me warm. My feet dangled in the lake water next to Laura’s. I splayed my toes and for once could not feel how small my left foot was. In the water, both feet floated weightless.

“Today,” I said and stretched my arms above my head. Hands, free of cane or guide rail, reached until they found the edge of a dock board. I slid my fingers between the boards. The underside of the wood was damp and warm, fragrant as I rubbed my fingers over it. Like velveteen rubbed wrong.

It was a perfect day, with the clouds building into foamy castles in the mid-August sky above. No ordinary sky this, but one under which Father should return to us. We had not seen him for four years, but it seemed longer than that, longer since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I was ten and Laura twelve when he last scooped us into his arms.

He was missing one of those arms now, Mother told us, and would be escorting Uncle Eugene’s casket home. Two brothers gone to war and only one returned to us. I closed my eyes to the castles and said silent thanks that it was our father come home. In the house behind us, our cousin did not have this luxury.

“Have you thought about what Uncle Eugene meant to you?” Laura asked.

I opened one eye to peer at her. She looked across the lake, still eating that apple. More juice dotted her chin, but she had not wiped it away.

“I don’t know what he meant to me,” I said.

Granny had bid us that morning to think on our uncle and what he meant to us. She wanted each of us to share this with the family at his funeral.

I could not remember his face without the aid of a photograph. There were many photographs of us prior to my illness, some taken by the pond that robbed me of my health.

What I remember of my uncle is this: large hands hidden under a dry, rough towel, the rotting smell of stagnant water, the gruff admonition to “damn well never do that again.”

“Aunt Esme made peach pie,” Laura said.

She had eaten the apple to its core and flung it into the lake. It landed with a plop, and I rose on my elbows to watch it bob in the water. Soon enough, a silver fish head glided up and swallowed it whole.

As children we spent summers with our aunt and uncle, so I was told. Laura could recall more than I could; remembered pie and picnics and the pond. She didn’t like to talk about the pond.

In the distance, I heard the slam of a car door, followed by another. Laura turned her head to listen.

“Father!”

She leapt up, her yellow and white daisy-print skirt brushing my face. She jammed her wet feet into her sandals and was halfway up the lawn before I had even sat up. I drew my feet out of the water and reached for my shoes.

But Laura came back for me. She lifted me into her arms, an action made easier from years of practice, and carried me up the lawn when I could not run with her.

Part of me didn’t want to see Father. I wanted to remember him as he was, broad shouldered and striking enough to challenge the moon to a beauty contest. I didn’t want to see his sorrow at the death of his brother, or the ways the war had likely changed him.

Laura carried me up the sloping lawn, and up the thirteen steps that brought us to the second-story back porch. There she made a grab for the towels Granny had left us on the rocking chairs. We were to come into the house dry or not at all. Laura gently deposited me into a chair, and I rubbed at my wet legs and feet.

“My shoes.”

This wasn’t at all how I wanted Father to see me. I cradled my withered left foot in my lap and listened to the sound of him — of Father after all these years — greeting Mother and Granny, Aunt Esme and Winnie. While they cried as my father came out of the car, I longed for my usual skirts, not these short pedal pushers, and for the thick and sturdy sole of my shoe.

“Walk or ride?” Laura asked. She offered her arms and I shook my head.

“Walk.”

My cane had been left at the dock as well, but there was a spare by the back door. I took up the length of pale wood and silently praised its smooth grip. Our grandfather certainly knew how to make a fine cane. He wouldn’t thank me if the fish carried off the one I had left behind.

I hobbled my way into the house after Laura, who ran with fluid strides. She burst through the open front door and hurled herself into Father’s arms.

The empty left sleeve of his shirt had been rolled and neatly pinned to stay out of his way. But it was the same shirt I remembered, the pale blue that was the color of Mother’s favorite vase. It was worn at the right collar and the left elbow. It would smell like Burma-Shave. It would smell like my father.

I stood in the doorway, watching Mother wipe her tears away and Laura grab cousin Winnie’s hand. There should have been two men come home. I could not clearly remember the second one, but there were those who could.

My father’s eyes sought me out and found me, even in shadow. He smiled and ran to me in long strides that made me think of a horse. So agile and balanced my father, even without his left arm.

“My girl,” he said, and swept me up. My small foot lifted from the floor, weightless in the air as my father spun me round, round, round.

Father and I were sitting on the back porch when I saw the lights on the island.

We each rocked in a rocking chair, wood planks below us making a kind of music. To and fro, back and forth, neither one of us could sit still. Laura was with us, but she sat near the porch railing, legs dangling into open air, silent all this time. While Father and I tried to fill the four-year gap we each carried, Laura looked across the dark lawn, toward the lake.

Its surface was black glass, reflecting every now and then a light from the houses on the opposite shore. But tonight, there was another light, a light that could come only from the island.

“Laura, what is that?” I asked.

But she had not noticed the light and didn’t until I pointed it out to her. The light didn’t look like any of the house lights or their reflections. It was golden and flickering. There was no breeze, so I imagined the flicker came each time someone crossed in front of it.

“Don’t go out there,” Father said, and blew a stream of pipe smoke into the night air.

The smoke plumed pale against the night, growing ever thinner until it was gone. I squinted across the lake, as if I might be able to see whoever was out there, but saw only a ripple on the glass lake, a moment’s disturbance in the reflected lights. Don’t go out there, I thought, but it was the one place I suddenly wanted to go. The expression on Laura’s face said the same. What were those lights? Who was out there? We both wanted to know.

Cousin Winnie couldn’t abide the idea of swimming in the lake. When she learned there were fish, she was doubly repulsed.

“All those fishy mouths. This is as close as I can get,” she said and sat down in the middle of the dock.

I could only get a little closer, sticking my bare feet in. It wasn’t that the fish bothered me; I wouldn’t have minded their fishy mouths nibbling at me. It was that I could not swim, not with my withered leg.

While Laura floated in the water up to her nose, with her hair fanning around her like seaweed, Winnie and I sat on the dock and made up stories about the island fire.

Winnie talked of young men, long limbs browned by the sun, hair glistening with lake water. She dreamed of their sodden swim trunks in colors we could not yet put a name to, and strong legs pushing off from the muddy island shore. She envisioned toe prints in the mud, not ten but twelve, each one webbed.

I dreamed up women — Dellaphina, Allegra, Mirabel — and clothed them in gossamer, spiderweb, water lily. Allegra wore her hair long and dark, and the spiders huddled there, frightened of the sunlight. But when she dove into the lake, the spiders bubbled up and swam for the lilies. They climbed, though the reeds were slippery, and found new homes deep inside the water blossoms. Dellaphina was the color of fire, her skin and her hair molten gold, for she was the light we had seen from shore, and how she danced! It was Mirabel’s first time to the island; she watched everyone and everything with wide eyes the color of fir trees.

“You’re both absurd,” Laura said, and turned lazy circles in the water before us. “It’s only ghosts. Japanese ghosts from the war. Come to haunt Father and keep him awake all night.”

Father had stayed awake late into the night; I listened to him pace on the back porch and smelled the tang of his pipe smoke. I shivered at Laura’s words, even though it was only pretend. She wanted him to tell her about the war, about killing, but he refused.

Laura asked, but I only hedged. What was it like, Father? was all I managed. He would scoop me up and laugh, because how could he tell any one of us what it was like? Someday, he would try, he said he owed that to us, but today was too soon; Laura’s make-believe ghosts were too close.

Laura floundered in the water, making a great show of sinking. She thrashed and flung water on us.

“I’m caught, oh! The ghosts are carrying me away!” Winnie came to her knees, wide-eyed like Mirabel, and shrieked until my sister rose, a laughing Venus from the waters.

Winnie didn’t find anything remotely funny about Laura’s game and stalked up the hill. She stalked slowly, though, allowing me to keep pace with her. As it neared the house, the brown sugar-dirt path forked and Winnie took the right branch, walking instead toward the gardens where hardworking bees hummed as they flitted from flower to flower. Winnie walked the row between the blackberry bushes, every now and then ripping a curling tendril of vine loose.

“I’m glad he’s dead. Glad.”

Winnie flung her handful of vines at me and fled faster than I could have followed if I cared to. I watched her go and even from a distance heard her cry.

Every night, Father paced the back porch. I kneeled in bed and peered through the filmy curtains that covered the window. When I felt especially brave, I parted the curtains and looked beyond my father, to the lake and its island with the flickering gold light. Don’t go out there, Father had said. Ghosts, I thought, and dived back under the covers.

The night after, I looked out and saw, instead of Father, the tail of my sister’s pale nightgown whipping down the stairs and into darkness. I watched her run barefoot down the sloping lawn and vanish.

I sat on the edge of my bed and waited, watching, but Laura didn’t come back. The hands on the clock moved through half an hour, and still she did not come. At an hour, the sky outside was beginning to brighten. I changed my nightgown for blouse and skirt, shoes and cane, and quietly made my way out of the house.

The lawn was slippery with dew. I stuck to the path that led to the dock, wondering if Laura had found Winnie’s island of young men, or mine of dancing women. Had the ghosts carried her away?

“That’s silly,” I told myself.

Not even the sound of my voice was a comfort, though, and I walked a little faster. I pictured Laura floating in the lake, hair spreading around her, water lily vines curled around her neck. Pictured her face gone blue, her eyes as black as the hem of her gown, scorched from the island fire. I stumbled.

The ground seemed to tip out from under me. I landed in the dew-damp grass breathing hard, all the while looking for Laura. I was about to scream her name when I saw her, stretched some distance away in the grass.

Laura’s hair and nightgown were wet, as though she had been swimming. The gown clung to her like a second skin, her hair madly tousled. Laura stretched, spreading fingers and toes into the first light of day, and saw me. Laughed at me.

“Where have you been?” I asked, sputtering as though I were the one wet after a dunking in the lake.

Laura said nothing. She rolled to her feet and made for the house, leaving a soaking footprint on each of those thirteen steps up. There was no towel waiting for her.

I looked at the lake, a ring of shadow even as the sky brightened; it would be some time before the sunlight touched it. I watched, holding my breath as I waited.

When the fish broke the surface, I gripped my cane and pushed myself to stand. I headed for the dock. The fish were numerous now, gathering to snatch the bugs that hovered in the half-light before dawn. They glided like magical creatures, and I kneeled on the dock to watch them.

One slithered its way to the dock. I reached down to stroke its back, but when it turned from belly to back, it was not fish scales I stroked. It was warm skin.

I pulled my hand back, staring at the young man in the water. He smiled at me, his russet curly hair dripping water into his eyes. He blinked the water away, dove beneath the surface, and came back up, breaking the water at the edge of the dock. I fell backward, afraid he would climb out and — And? I couldn’t complete the thought; I had no idea what he might do.

“Where did you come from?” I asked in a whisper.

He laughed at me and pointed across the lake. “I saw your sister,” he said, “and came to say hello.”

There were other fish in the water, I could see them clearly now. Maybe they weren’t fish at all. I held my cane across my chest. If he made to come closer, I could strike him. But he didn’t come closer; he paddled in the water a short distance off the dock, then turned and dove and was gone.

As quickly as that, he was gone, and I didn’t see him surface again. I watched and waited, and my father came to get me, and still the young man didn’t come up for air. I think I was breathing hard enough for both of us.

Later in the bathroom as I tidied myself, there lingered a glimmer of fish scales on my fingertips. I washed these off as quickly as I could and hurried to join my family for breakfast.

“She couldn’t have been more than five,” Aunt Esme said. She wiped her ringed fingers across her apron-covered belly, leaving broad strokes of flour on the polka-dotted fabric.

“Seven if she was a day; a mother knows,” Mother said.

My mother and Esme worked side by side rolling pie dough, debating when I had learned to walk again. I wanted to tell them that I was still learning, that I hadn’t mastered it at seven or fourteen, but I kept quiet. I pressed the star-shaped cookie cutter into the dough they had rolled for me. Granny sat at my side, weaving lattice over cherry pies. Father was resting, and Laura and Winnie had left without me that morning.

“Eugene had it right though, walking her every day the way he did,” Granny said.

My head came up at that. “Uncle Eugene taught me how to walk?”

Mother and Esme looked back at me together, as if they were joined at the shoulder and had to turn as one. They could have been sisters, not sisters-in-law, with their curling auburn hair and green eyes.

“He would have doctored you himself if he knew what he was doing,” Esme said with a wide smile. She had a nice mouth, colored into a bow with red lipstick. “Like as not, he’d have wound you into a taffy puller to get that leg of yours pulled straight and true.”

I pressed the star cutter into the dough but didn’t pull it free. “I don’t remember much about him.” Admitting this did not shock my aunt or mother the way I thought it would. I withdrew Uncle Eugene’s photograph from my pocket, and Esme sighed when she saw it.

“Lord, wasn’t he as handsome as autumn apples.” Esme wiped her hands clean and took the photograph. “This was taken at the Seattle house, by the pond.” Her eyes flicked up to me. “I’m so sorry, sweet one.”

“Talking about it doesn’t bother me,” I said.

“She has what you might call a fascination about it,” Mother said, and smiled at me the way you might at someone who needed calming before they came unhinged.

“It’s just that you’d think I would remember,” I said.

“What’s to remember?” Esme said. She handed the photograph back to me, before peeling the dough away from the stars I had cut and working it into another ball. “It was a warm day and you wanted to swim.”

It was my unfortunate luck to go swimming in contaminated water. “I mean my uncle. He taught me to walk again. He—” I looked up at my aunt, finally putting the pieces together. “He pulled me out that day, didn’t he?”

“That he did. Like I said, he would have doctored you up if he’d a known how.”

I slipped the photograph into my pocket as Laura and Winnie came into the room. Their cheeks were glowing, the tips of their hair clinging wetly to their shirts. I stared at the pair of them as they danced around Mother and Esme, twirling and laughing.

“Come swim,” Laura said, and wriggled her damp head in Mother’s face.

“Yes, do!” Winnie snuggled up to Esme, who pushed her away and pretended revulsion.

“Since when do you swim, my daughter? Since when?” Esme laughed when Winnie took her by the hands and twirled her around.

Couldn’t abide all those fish mouths.

Don’t go out there.

Winnie leaned across the counter and grasped my hands, the dough stars squashed under the press of her arms. Her fingers curled into my hands, pinching. “Will you come?” she asked.

“I—”

“Oh!” Winnie’s mouth widened in an O that told me she hadn’t forgotten I couldn’t swim, just that she didn’t care if she reminded me.

Winnie gave me what probably passed as a sweet smile to everyone else, but to me it stung like a slap. I saw the void within her dark eyes and heard the echo of her words amid the blackberry vines. I’m glad he’s dead. Glad.How could anyone think it, let alone his own daughter?

I waited each night for Laura to leave the house. She always went in her nightgown and grew smart enough to leave out a towel for herself. Tonight, she left even before our parents had turned out their light.

She looked small against the lawn in her bright white gown. It fluttered behind her like wings, her hair loose around her shoulders. I drew an image in my mind of her rushing off to meet a secret lover, and remembered the boy in the lake.

I watched Laura now, kneeling at the end of the dock, wriggling her hand in the water. She stood, stripped her nightgown off, and dove into the water.

In the room next to mine, my mother laughed. It was followed by my father’s voice — was he singing? I pressed my forehead to the cool window and stared down at the puddle of Laura’s nightgown. What was she doing? Had she lost her mind? In the distance, I saw the light on the island and shivered.

Night made the walk to the lake too dangerous for me to contemplate, but I did contemplate it. I thought long and hard, but fell asleep before I could decide. I woke with a start, to a clock that read eight A.M.

I stumbled out of my room and ran into Laura in the hall. She was humming, tying her hair with a ribbon at the nape of her neck.

“Laura—”

“Morning, sleepyhead,” she said and glided past me, into her room. She closed the door behind her, and that was that.

There wasn’t a moment in the day to ask what she had done. I watched as she and Winnie exchanged secretive glances, and wondered if Winnie had taken to swimming in the lake with her. Had they gone to the island?

Laura repeated the pattern over the next two nights, and I never saw any sign of Winnie. It was the following morning that Winnie came to my room, just before sunrise, in tears.

“Is she here?” Winnie looked around the room. Winnie looked in the closet and under the bed before flopping back on it with a sob.

“She?”

“ ‘ She’ Laura, your sister!”

“What’s happened?” I asked, and slowly lowered myself to the foot of the bed.

Winnie wiped the sleeve of her nightgown over her wet cheeks. “It was supposed to be a game, but you didn’t play.”

I frowned at Winnie but said nothing.

“The light on the island, the stories we told, Laura going off to swim.” Winnie seemed to want to laugh, but it came out as another sob. “Why couldn’t you play?”

Father’s words hadn’t been a game though; he was serious when he told us not to go out there. Did he know the island’s secret, or was he simply being a father?

“Was I supposed to follow her?”

Winnie nodded.

I shook my head and offered my cousin a handkerchief. She took it without looking at me. “I can’t walk down there at night, not safely.”

“Not even for your own sister?”

The accusation, that it was my fault Laura was now missing, did not go unheard.

“I thought you two were together, that you meant to make me jealous, or that she was meeting someone—”

Winnie looked at me now, and I didn’t like her expression, dark and lined and old, like someone had taken a coffee-stained cloth and draped it over her face. “Someone? What someone? What do you know?”

A knock at the door saved me from answering, from telling her about the boy in the lake.

“Lizzie, you all right?” Father asked.

I grabbed the blanket and threw it over Winnie’s head before crossing to the door. I opened it and smiled at my father.

“Winnie had a bad dream,” I said.

Father looked beyond me, to the lump on my bed. I followed his gaze to see Winnie’s pale face emerging from the blanket.

“You all right?” Father asked her.

Winnie nodded. “Lizzie is a great comfort,” she said, and smiled through a new haze of tears.

“Indeed,” Father said. He kissed me on the forehead before drawing the door shut and leaving us.

“What someone?” Winnie asked again, standing so close to me that I jumped.

I turned to look at my cousin, feeling courage curl around my shoulders. “Why are you glad your father is dead?”

Winnie held my gaze and at first said nothing. When she would have turned away from me, I grabbed her arm. My arms and hands were strong, and I held her effortlessly. She squirmed and still I held on; Winnie resigned herself to captivity.

“Everything would be fine if you hadn’t gone into the pond,” she said, a growl shading her voice black.

I released Winnie’s arm. Courage left me small as ever, and I wanted only to leave this room. But now it was Winnie who took hold of me.

“The water made you sick, and he blamed himself.” She shook me hard. “Fretted over you every which way he could. Paid for doctors. Drove hours just to walk with you.” Winnie leaned in so close that our foreheads almost touched. “He loved you the way he should have loved me.”

“Winnie, no.”

“I didn’t want a sister, and neither did Laura. Wanted to toss you in the lake myself, let the fish eat you.”

Laura once told me that gypsies left me on the porch one winter’s evening, in a Burma-Shave box. I was a nuisance to the tribe and they could no longer stand me and my crooked body, so they deposited me at the first house that looked sturdy enough to withstand my screaming.

Father thought he had won a great contest and had been rewarded with his favorite shaving cream. When he discovered otherwise, it was too late, for that’s how gypsy magic works. Take the child in, and she’s yours forever.

It wasn’t polio that withered my leg, Laura would say, it was the gypsy in me. Our parents overlooked it, but they loved her best, for she was their true daughter. The first time I heard such things, I cried; I cried until I was weak and empty and Father had to carry me to bed. That same feeling drew around me now, of being empty and never understanding why.

“I tried to get sick,” Winnie whispered, “and couldn’t, so I wished you dead, wished you dead so many times and now — And now he’s gone—”

Winnie couldn’t talk around the tears. I wanted to hug her and at the same time shove her away. Winnie turned away from me and crossed to the window, to push the curtain back and look at the lake. In daylight, everything seemed normal; the island was just a small lump of tree-covered land.

“She’s out there,” Winnie said. “On the island with those young men. They’ve snatched her away.”

My heart leapt into my throat. “How—”

“What do you see when you look out there, at that tree, Lizzie?” she asked me. I came to stand by her side, seeking comfort in the lines of the old tree.

“The Madonna tree,” I said.

“That’s what everyone says. What do you really see?”

I looked at the tree and saw broad shoulders, two arms encircling two children. I saw my father, whole and strong, holding me and Laura, holding us beyond all danger. I shook my head, refusing to tell Winnie this.

“Only the old tree, that’s all.”

“I see a vulture,” Winnie said. “And if we go there, it will pluck our bones clean.”

We disliked each other, Winnie and me, but we linked arms and pretended to be the best of friends in front of our parents and Granny. Laura had left without us that morning, we said, walking around the lake. We meant to head out the other way and catch her coming around. Granny smiled at us and offered us pocket pies wrapped in wax paper. We each took one, and left the house as fast as we could.

We walked two houses over, then cut through the yard, down to the lake. It didn’t escape me that Winnie and Laura could still be playing their game. Still, I played along now, because no matter how hateful Winnie could be, her fear this morning at Laura’s absence was genuine.

“We’ll row out,” Winnie said, and kneeled beside a small green boat lashed to the dock. “We’ll—”

Whatever Winnie meant to say was lost in a scream. A glistening silver hand wrapped around her wrist. I covered her mouth to silence her and looked down into the eyes of the young man I had spoken with days before.

“Only Lizzie comes,” he said.

Winnie jerked away from both of us, leaving me to sprawl on the dock. She couldn’t get her feet under her though and settled for crawling some distance away.

“W-what is it?” she asked.

The morning sun draped the young man’s shoulders not in gold but silver. He was silver everywhere I looked, save for the mop of russet curls on his head. Silver from scales.

“Laura needs you, Lizzie,” he said and lifted a hand to me. “She’s on the island.”

“I can’t swim,” I said. “But I would try. I would.”

The young man shook his head. “There’s more than one way to cross water. You can row. And bring her pie,” he added before slipping under the water.

I looked at Winnie and held a hand out for her pie. “You heard him.”

“What — you’re going? Lizzie!”

“I can’t leave Laura there.” Not when I knew now that this was no game of pretend.

“He’ll pluck your bones clean,” Winnie said, and threw her pocket pie at me before huddling on the dock. The pie fell short of my grasp, but I picked it up, looking at Winnie so small and scared. I felt a moment’s pity when I climbed into the boat, feeling equally small. I set the pocket pies on the seat opposite me. “Untie me, Winnie.”

She untied the boat and pushed it away while I fitted the heavy oars into their locks. I watched Winnie grow smaller and smaller while behind me I felt the Madonna tree growing larger. Its shadow spread over the surface of the lake and seemed to pull me toward the island.

When I saw the russet head in the water, I jumped in surprise, fearing I would hit it with an oar. But he moved like a fish, effortlessly under and around the boat and oars. He broke the surface of the water twice to smile at me, to beckon me onward when I felt my arms tire.

“You’re almost there,” he said, and a moment later the boat touched the muddy island shore.

I climbed out on shaking legs, shaking even more when the young man handed me the pocket pies and my cane. He had legs, legs like any normal man, but his feet and hands were webbed, and every inch of him was covered in shining scales.

“She’s just up here, Lizzie,” he said, and stepped through the trees.

I looked back at the far shore, the houses nearly swallowed by trees and greenery. How small they seemed, and I couldn’t see Winnie at all but somehow felt myself being watched.

I turned and followed the young man into the trees. He guided me to the center of the island, to the base of the Madonna tree where a fire burned and my sister rested, wearing only her nightgown. Her feet and legs were flecked with dried mud.

“Laura!”

She lifted her head, eyes widening at the sight of me.

“Lizzie! Oh Lizzie, how wonderful, how wonderful! Come, you must come.”

Laura drew me into her arms, and I saw then that she was clothed in a silver gown, one that sparkled like the young man’s scales. When I looked for him, I found him across a grand ballroom, dressed in midnight blue from head to toe. He nodded at me, then twirled away with a woman in his arms. It was Dellaphina, liquid and gold, running into his silver and blue as they danced to a high-blowing flute. Dellaphina kicked up her feet and the world was awash in golden warmth.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Laura asked me. “Look!”

Allegra had come to the party, her dark hair writhing with spiders. Her gown was ebony, her lips scarlet, and no one touched her as she crossed their paths. She walked to the water and sank into it. A string of ghosts trailed behind her, gray and thin like clouds, some wrapped in foggy cloaks. Among them, I recognized Uncle Eugene, handsome as autumn apples. He raised his hand to me, and I to him. Tears blurred my vision.

“Thank you, thank you—” I said, knowing then what he meant to me, and that I could never put it into proper words. He meant what Laura meant to me, and Mother and Father and Granny. And even Winnie. Even her. We were each pieces of the other, incomplete without the other.

Eugene passed with Allegra and the other ghosts into the water, and I felt the hollow ring of my heart. I knew what Father felt, to lose his brother; knew what it would be to lose Laura.

“Oh, Lizzie, look out!”

Laura laughed as a man swept me into his arms. My feet came away from the ground and the world blurred, a confused painting of half-real dancers. I tried to free myself but could not, so I relaxed in the man’s arms and felt my father’s embrace. I breathed deeply and smelled the tang of his pipe and felt the world slip out from under me. Everything else could wait.

But it was Laura’s face that stood out clearly as we danced; Laura’s face that was sharp and real when everything else was indistinct. When I focused on my sister, I found myself able to leave the man’s arms, to cross to her side and keep the whirling dance to my back.

“Lizzie? Dance with me?”

“You need to eat. Granny sent these,” I said and opened the packet of pocket pies. “Here.”

We ate the pies, and Granny’s crust flaked over us like snow. We ate every bit, Laura’s blackberry and mine cherry, and licked our fingers clean. By the time we had finished, the dancers had vanished, like a wonderful dream.

I covered Laura’s fire over with dirt and made certain every bit of it was out before we left. Laura didn’t laugh at the idea of me rowing here on my own; she didn’t say much of anything as we left the island.

The sun was lower in the sky — had an entire day almost passed? I imagined Mirabel’s wide fir-eyes watching us as we went and pulled the oars with all my strength to leave this place behind.

At the neighbor’s dock, Winnie hauled both of us out of the boat. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, her clothing soaking wet, a coil of water lily vines caught in the collar of her shirt. Winnie hugged even me, blubbering apologies and something about ghosts. Had she seen her own while she waited?

The three of us were a mess when we came into the house, wet clothing, muddy feet. Granny said nothing, just handed us towels and told us to get cleaned up. My father caught me by the arm and held me back when Winnie and Laura went giggling into the bathroom.

“I told you not to go out there,” he said, but his voice wasn’t angry.

“I had to go.”

Father understood this in a way no one else in the house could have. I knew then that he was still my father; no matter what the war had done to him, he was still a vital piece of me. He smoothed my damp hair behind my ears and kissed my nose.

In my bedroom, I stripped out of my clothes and pulled a dressing gown on. Where the curtain hung askew, I could see a sliver of the lake. Ripples too large to be from a fish moved through the water, and I held my breath.

A young man in his silver scales jumped in the air, twisted in the sunlight. He spread his hands into the air, reaching for something I could not see—

— the edge of the dock warm and velveteen under my own questing fingers—

When I looked again, he was gone. Quick and bright. I hoped Mirabel had seen.

E. CATHERINE TOBLER lives and writes in Colorado — strange how that works out. Among other places, her fiction has appeared in SCI FICTION, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. For more, visit www.ecatherine.com.

Island Lake is a real place. My grandparents live there, and I spent countless summers fishing and swimming its waters. My cousins and I used to float in inner tubes to the island in the lake, and as we went, strange things would slither past our legs under the dark water.

Sometimes they were water lilies; other times, who knows? Was it more than just fish nibbling at our toes? This lake watered my writer’s brain from an early age. This story is one result.