Behind the house was a black lake. Behind the house, below the back garden with the late-blooming dinnerplate dahlias, past the crumbling woodpile that prickled with wild mushrooms, was a black lake. The lake was as round as a looking glass and as lightless as pitch. Though it was not a wide lake—one could nearly skip a stone across it—it was queerly deep, sinking to a depth of nearly forty feet at its black, bullseye middle.
The middle was like a bullseye, in that anything dropped into the lake aimed straight toward it. If you tossed a stick in, it would make for that center no matter where it landed, drifting swiftly over the still, dark water with scarcely a ripple.
Mary never saw ripples in the black lake unless she threw something in. She had experimented with all sorts of things—sticks, leaves, acorns, a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. They all did the same thing: drifted to the middle and then sank. They sank purposefully, like they were hurling themselves off the edge of something. Sticks turned nose-downward and plunged like shipwrecks to their doom. Even sealed water bottles went down like the Hindenburg.
The only exception was rocks. Very heavy things couldn’t float across the surface of the lake; they sank right away. But Mary knew somehow, deep in her bones, that the rocks were slowly creeping along the murky lake bottom toward the middle just like everything else.
The black lake had been there longer than anything. A great, gnarled oak hung low above the water, its hoary branches shutting out sunlight and moonlight alike from reaching the shadowy depths. But the lake had been there far longer than the aged tree. Beneath the soil, its cool springs had nourished the fresh roots of the young oak sapling, turning its leaves dark and healthy.
Rick had printed out a survey map of the property when they’d first bought it, and the lake had been on there. It didn’t have a name, it was simply there—a black shape on the paper like an inkblot. Mary had felt a strange shudder looking at it. But there wasn’t any reason for that; it was only a lake.
It increased the property value, having not just one but two lakes on the twenty-five acres. The other lake was a regular scummy green, shallow and dense with flowering lily pads in the spring. Mary could throw a stick for Rags, the Springer Spaniel, and he would splash happily into the green water to fetch it, sending the frogs scattering.
Mary would never ever throw a stick into the black lake if Rags were nearby. It horrified her even to think about what might happen to him—how he’d be snared from below by some unseen force and dragged helplessly across the water’s surface like a seal in a shark’s mouth, before being sucked down, down, down to a watery grave.
Ridiculous, the sort of thoughts that came to her when she was alone these days.
Thankfully, the older Mary got, the faster the days and even the years passed. What a relief it was for time to move quickly. Time healed all things, so the faster time went, the sooner things got patched up. Bones reknit, and scars faded so you could only see them in the sunlight, pale shadows of the past tattooed faintly on the body. From the perspective of a centuries-old lake, the life of one middle-aged woman, however miserable, was essentially meaningless.
It comforted Mary to think this way. She liked imagining how the earth might look one day, when everyone was gone. The planet might be a blasted rock by then, used up by the frenzied, insatiable greed of its former inhabitants, but with enough time, things might be mended. Tree roots could split the ruined foundations of multinational corporations. The golden bathrooms of dictators could be reclaimed by moss and rot.
This, too, was comforting.
#
Mary and Gail sat together in the conservatory that overlooked the garden. It was late summer, the dahlias still riotously in bloom. You couldn’t see the black lake from here, through all that bursting foliage, but Mary knew it was down there, like a cold spot her mind might reach out and touch at any moment.
She picked tensely at her cinnamon bun, realizing she’d peeled away all the raisins; each one sat on her saucer, a small black dot. They seemed to quiver up at her strangely.
“Have things been any better with Rick lately?” Gail asked, stirring her tea.
Mary smiled and pushed her saucer away. “Oh, everything’s fine.”
The conservatory was quiet for a while except for the tinkling of Gail’s spoon. How long would she stir that tea? It seemed to have gone on for hours! Mary imagined snatching the spoon out of her hand and dashing it dramatically to the floor—maybe stomping on it too, really making a mess of things and staining the rug. She imagined the shocked look on Gail’s face. That would be the last time she ever came around here snooping, anyway. Then maybe Mary could finally have some peace, with her black heart, in the midst of all this endless greenery.
Instead she raised her cup and sipped at her own tea, which was a bit too hot and scalded her tongue. It felt like the hundredth jab of a needle into Mary’s nailbed—the absolute last straw.
She set her cup down slowly, being careful not to chip it, or hurl it against the window. Mary actually saw herself doing this: smashing her full teacup across the garden scene below, so that black tea drenched the glass and blotted out the belligerent dahlias. She had to clench her hands to keep them still. She knew she should’ve taken that extra pill this morning, with Gail coming to fuss and unsettle her routine.
“Are you sure?” Gail asked.
“I don’t know,” said Mary, flustered. “What was the question again?”
“I was just asking about Rick. Is his temper any better lately?”
Mary winced. Of course Gail (the town gossip, of all people) had witnessed some little spat in the town square soon after they’d moved here, when Rick had a few too many at the local bar. After Mary had balked at getting in the car with him, he had physically shoved her out into the street, tossing a handful of crumpled bills at her feet and telling her to find her own way home. A regular Tuesday night for the married couple, but Gail had made a national case out of it ever since.
Mary mused now on the word—temper. Such a funny word, so linked to temperament. That was one of the first things she’d been drawn to about Rick, actually: his temperament. The truth was, Rick could be a hoot. If the winds didn’t change, and his team won the game, and the food came quickly, and there was no traffic on the way home, and no one looked at him wrong or contradicted him, or seemed like a feminist, or god-forbid mentioned the environment… well, then, Rick could be a real hoot.
When Rick and Mary first got together (they had both been working in the oil patch back then, and meeting up for pizza and TV dates in Rick’s trailer), just about everyone had used the word hoot to describe him. It had seemed so benign, like the hoot of an owl. It should have sounded like the blare of a siren.
“It’s better when he’s not drinking,” said Mary, hoping the obvious follow-up question wouldn’t occur to Gail. Most people didn’t follow up if you kept things on a surface level. The trick was to skirt around the edges of the darkness, avoiding its sinkhole center—that way you couldn’t get sucked down.
“Oh, good,” Gail said. “I worry about you, living all the way out here.”
“It’s such a beautiful property,” said Mary. “So big and scenic. We’re lucky to have it.”
“Of course,” agreed Gail. “But so isolated, so wild!”
“It’s completely unspoiled forest. Rick insisted on retiring somewhere totally natural and pristine.”
“But don’t you ever get nervous walking the dog at night? It’s the middle of nowhere!”
“Rags protects me,” said Mary, bending to fondle the dog’s soft ears.
“I’d worry about bears,” Gail went on maddeningly. “Or cougars! They’ll attack a small dog.”
“We like the privacy,” said Mary tightly.
“Of course, you’re still pretty new to the area,” Gail said ominously, then paused to take a bite of her cinnamon bun.
“Yes?” Mary prompted.
“Well,” Gail mumbled, stuffing crumbs back into her mouth, “I was just going to say, you probably haven’t heard the whole history of this place yet.”
“Oh?” With effort, Mary managed to keep from glancing down, past the garden, toward the dense woods. “What history is that?”
“Isn’t there a lake on the property?” Gail asked. “There was a terrible incident years ago. Two brothers, if I remember rightly.”
“A drowning?” Mary flinched in spite of herself. “There is a lake, but it’s not the sort of place children ought to be swimming.”
“I’m afraid it was a bit more sinister than that,” said Gail, leaning forward eagerly as Mary shrank away. “They were grown men, not children—business partners in some big timber concern back when this house was first built. It was their company that felled all these trees, in fact, and cleared the whole side of the mountain to build this place. Anyway, the surviving brother swore they were both out swimming in the lake one day when his brother was just sucked down by an undertow or something! Mind you, they dragged the lake, and there was nothing down there—no missing brother. Naturally, a lot of people suspected it was no accident. Folks around here thought one brother probably killed the other one, and hid his body out there in the woods somewhere. But nothing was ever found.”
“Good lord,” said Mary faintly. “So what happened?”
“Well, nothing.” Gail sighed and sank back in her creaking wicker chair. “As I said, there was never any proof. The brother who lived ended up selling off the property and leaving the area for good. Well, he had to! Local folks blamed him, and they didn’t try to hide it. He always stuck to his story. But the lake was searched!”
Oh yes, thought Mary darkly. It would be searched, all right. But they wouldn’t find anything. Not in that black lake, they wouldn’t.
“How awful,” she said, taking another sip of her tea. It was cooler now, and made a wonderful excuse for not talking.
Mary didn’t want to talk any more about the black lake. She didn’t even want to think about it. Thinking of something could bring it closer to you in the darkness, making it turn toward you as it sensed your attention on it.
So it was a relief when Gail took another big bite of her cinnamon bun and turned the conversation to the upcoming bake sale hosted by the Ladies’ Auxiliary Club. There were things Mary didn’t want coming any closer than they already were right now, and the black lake was only one of them.
#
Slowly and all at once, the seasons changed, and soon it was New Year’s Eve. To celebrate, Rick built a fire on the snowy shores of the black lake, and he and Mary hauled down blankets and a picnic basket packed with wine and snacks.
Unlike the green lake, which was covered over in winter by a fine layer of white ice that you could crack with a tossed stone, the black lake was as dark and glassy as ever. It cast back the light of the leaping fire, a churning inferno reflected at its still center.
It was a grim, stark place to ring in the new year. But Rick had always liked dramatic things. His home office had a medieval suit of armor in the corner and a saber-toothed tiger skull on the built-in bookshelf. He liked listening to Wagner on full blast. His head was huge and shaggy like a bear’s, and when he walked into a room, his footsteps made the floor tremble.
Ever since he’d retired, Rick had gone back to wearing the padded work shirts and sturdy Timberland boots of his youth. The CEO lifestyle had always fit him better than the stiff, tailored wardrobe that went with it. Mary, too, missed the cute fringed jackets and boot-cut jeans she used to flaunt in the old days, before they’d left Alberta for the West Coast. She wished she could get away with dressing like her young self again. But here, everyone looked at her funny if she wore anything but yoga pants, or forgot to ask for oat beverage instead of regular milk.
Then there was the constant rain. It never let up. Skies were gray, lakes and rivers overflowed in the winters, and basements flooded. Mildew was a fact of life. It wasn’t called the “wet” coast for nothing.
But Rick’s promotion to head of offshore-pipeline development had meant that they did actually require a shore, as he’d sarcastically explained to her. That meant Mary couldn’t have her nice Audi, or her pharmacy’s worth of pills, or her fucking Pilates equipment without a shore.
Mary knew all this to be true. Still, it had been very hard leaving behind her whole family and all her friends to come to this strange, damp climate where everyone did yoga. She’d needed those pills and that Pilates equipment to keep her head above water. If only Rick had agreed to move back to Alberta after retiring, instead of bringing them to this big house beside this strange black lake—perhaps everything would have been different.
It was extremely dark down by the lake with only the fire to light the moonless night. It was cold, too. Mary could see her breath, a creeping fog she hadn’t known was brewing inside her.
Rick poured their wine, explaining for the billionth time how only boors let the neck of the bottle clink against the glass.
“See, this is the kind of shit that rednecks like your family will never understand,” he lectured, swirling his wine vigorously in the glass to confirm some hidden quality it was meant to display. “There’s a certain elegance to doing things the right way—every little thing.”
“Right,” Mary said vacantly.
Rick loved to explain things, and like any great performer, he had his greatest hits: the root causes of crime, why the term “elitist” was actually a compliment, what women really wanted from men, and everything about driving. After so many years, Mary didn’t have to tune in fully to produce the required responses on cue.
“Just look at the drug problems back where you’re from,” he went on, transitioning smoothly like a singer sliding into his next set. “That’s lack of discipline, letting the little things slide. That New York mayor had it right—crack down on the small crimes, and you stop the big crimes from happening. Those Calgary cops need to crack some heads! Mind you, Vancouver’s bad too. You can’t take a piss these days without tripping on some homeless tent-city protester. Like those eco-terrorist bums would last one day without so-called ‘Big Oil’ powering their economy!”
“Mmhmm.” Mary gulped her wine. The alcohol mingled with the pills she had swallowed earlier to create a hazy, impressionistic wash that replaced the ordinary world like silk thrown over a lampshade. When she closed her eyes, the dancing firelight made strange, nightmare shapes against her eyelids. Some of them looked like men drowning.
#
For months now, Mary had lain in bed at night and felt the deep, magnetic pull of the black lake radiating uphill past the garden and creeping along the back deck to tap at her window. Thinking about it only made it worse, but she couldn’t stop. A double or even triple dose of her sleeping pills was powerless in the face of such elemental forces.
Rick slept like the dead. Nothing ever bothered him. He could drown a bag of kittens and not feel a single pang of conscience. He’d probably find some reason killing the kittens was Mary’s fault, like it had paid for her pedicures or something.
Gail was right. It was very isolated here. The only sound at night was the wind in the trees and (she noted with some bitter irony) the odd hoot of an owl. Once, in the middle of the night, Mary had awoken to see an owl peering at her through the skylight. Very white it had been, with a round black eye. Mary had felt strongly that it was trying to communicate with her—convey something important—but she couldn’t tell what. She’d held her breath, sweat coursing down her brow, until the owl had flown away. The next morning, she couldn’t be sure it hadn’t been a dream.
Mary kept on doing her yoga and taking the pills that were meant to help with her arthritis. There had been a time, years ago, when snapping Mary’s fingers well past their breaking point, one after another, was the only way Rick could unwind in the evenings. Marriage could be a brutal sort of compromise, especially when your husband worked in a high-stress industry.
These days, he was more apt to slap her face—just once, sharply, and say smarten up!—or else hide her pills, which was far worse. Mary would endure almost anything to avoid having her pills taken away. Her driver’s license had expired years ago, so unless Rick drove her to town, she had no way of refilling her prescriptions. And the fact was, pills helped Mary with compromise just as much as they did with arthritis. The things Rick did to her at night (still insisted on doing, no matter how much she protested) were so much easier to bear with the soft cushion of pharmaceuticals beneath her.
Sometimes Rick gave Mary’s pills back, but she could see that the levels in the bottles had gone down. When she asked him, of course he said no, he hadn’t kept any pills, but Mary knew he had. He planned to dole them out to Mary whenever he wanted to—when an attractive female colleague came over for dinner, for instance, or one of Mary’s ex-best friends. Rick would mix drinks for everyone, and soon Mary would start to feel very woozy and sleepy, and then Rick would say maybe she should go and take a nap.
The rest of the night would be a blackout that sucked Mary down to its infernal core. She’d awaken in strange places, with torn clothes and shameful injuries. Then she would know Rick had given her some of her own pills, stirred into her drink.
“You’re such a lush,” he’d say dismissively, if she ever confronted him. “Stop blaming me for your inability to control yourself. You don’t even know what happened.”
But Mary did have some memories from those hazy, terrible nights: feverish dreams of staggering from room to room in her own unfamiliar home, groping bonelessly over the walls, or fighting to breathe beneath crushing restraints while cruel hands manipulated her, doll-like, for their sinister party games.
The most recent memory (hallucination? drug-fueled nightmare?) had been the worst. They’d thrown a summer party with some of Rick’s former coworkers to celebrate his retirement and the purchase of their new home. Sometime late in the evening, Mary had been staggering off for one of her inevitable naps. She remembered teetering like a diver at the top of the long staircase, trying to work up the courage to edge one jellied ankle out into empty space while a chorus of distorted laughter blared behind her. That’s when she had felt a shove—sharp and hard—right in the middle of her back. Then free-fall. She had tumbled all the way down, down, down, into the dark nothingness at the bottom of the staircase.
The next morning, she’d awoken to find herself covered in dark bruises—the result of a drunken stumble, Rick said. He thought Mary didn’t remember anything. Probably he would have preferred if Mary was no longer around in the morning to remember.
But Mary did remember.
And she didn’t forget.
#
Then one day in early autumn, not long after Gail’s visit, Mary was shaving her legs in the shower when she noticed a small spot of black mold growing fuzzily in the corner of her bathroom ceiling. Mary instructed the housekeeper to scrub it with bleach, but it came right back. By December, it had more than doubled in size.
The spot was right above her head, exactly where she would stop and glance up while she was shaving her legs. That’s when Mary began to know for sure: something was trying to communicate with her.
Perhaps, she thought dizzily as she lay in bed, it had even sent Gail as a messenger—to let Mary know the full extent of the lake’s powers! The thought gave her a thrill.
People always underestimated nature, didn’t they? Men thought they dominated the natural world, could plunder as deeply and as greedily as they pleased.
But men were fools. Women, like Mary, knew something of powerlessness, of the humiliation of the self. Women could bend before a greater power, adapt and survive, but men were incapable. Instead they just kept driving their little kingdoms into the dust.
Mary strolled through her house filled with beautiful things. She and Rick had traveled all over the world in the twenty-five years they’d been married (mostly the last ten, when they’d been rich). Shelves upon shelves groaned with brightly painted trinkets brought back from Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, and wherever else Rick and his offshore boys did business. The wall above the rec room bar was packed with tribal masks from all over West Africa, which stared at Mary as she passed them on her way to the wine fridge. The whole place was plastered with breathtaking art they had paid almost nothing for.
Mary imagined a thick, gnarled branch from one of the huge oak trees outside bursting in through her kitchen window like a fist. Moss and lichen would spread hungrily over the costly stainless-steel appliances, dulling their shine. Rain would pour in through the roof and flood the fake umbrella trees. Many lost and stranded things might break free of their cases and catch a ride with a departing river, following it back home.
As she circled back into the foyer, Mary locked eyes with a large, hand-carved leopard statue that stood guard by the front door. Its black gaze bore steadily into her. Mary sipped her wine and nodded subtly, for the leopard’s eyes only. Yes, she understood. Somewhere deep beneath both their feet, things were shifting. The whole world was beginning to make sense again.
#
So Mary had made up her mind to be excited about the New Year’s Eve picnic. The start of a new era. She’d applied her lipstick, tucked her pills safely into her pocket, and traipsed down through the deep snow to the lake.
She and Rick made a cozy spot near the shoreline, laying out blankets next to the fire Rick had built. They touched their wine glasses together in a toast. It was easy to think of things to drink to.
“To a long retirement, spent right here,” sighed Rick, sniffing the fresh air.
Mary smiled and tucked the blanket around her legs.
Before long, Rick had moved onto the scotch. He’d packed a bottle of Glenfiddich in the basket, with one stout tumbler of cut crystal.
“It’s not racist to point out that some people are objectively worse at driving,” he said, gesturing with his scotch so the crystal caught the firelight and scattered it. “It’s called observing reality. But I guess facts aren’t always convenient to the narrative.”
The drink sloshed in his hand as he talked. Mary watched an amber wave of liquid crest the rim of the tumbler and spill over, splashing his thumb. Such big hands he had, with big meaty fingers and thick veins that crisscrossed his hairy knuckles. Big paws, Mary’s dad used to say, back when they’d still seen Mary’s family every so often.
Had her dad suspected how many of his daughter’s bad nights and ruined dreams Rick held concealed in each sizable fist? Perhaps. Mary’s father had disliked Rick and had even tried to warn her about him—little comments about temperament and such. Not everyone had thought he was such a hoot, after all.
But Mary had not listened. And her father had never followed up. Years had passed, and everyone had gone on passively skating over the surface. Hardly anyone ever bothered delving to the true, dreadful heart of things.
Only now Mary realized you couldn’t go on like that. Nature would reassert itself. What was trapped would burst free; that was simply how it worked. Little kingdoms fell every single day to the vast, unstoppable tides of sand and time.
There was a small black smudge on the tip of Rick’s thumb. Probably it was only soot from building the fire, but Mary was nevertheless transfixed by it. She could feel it staring back at her like a lidless eye. She couldn’t look away from it.
This was it, then. The moment. The signal she was waiting for had come. How ironic that it would come in this way, and from this source—this hand, which she had taken once, so many years ago, of her own volition; this hand that had inflicted so much suffering in the decades since then. In the end, it would cause even him pain, for with its gaze, it called out directly to Mary:
End my wrath and my destruction. End it now, or there will never be an end.
This Mary was prepared to do. She found she had been preparing for a long time without really letting herself know it. There was a deep pool at the center of Mary—a deep, dark, churning pool of bad nights, bruised mornings, and bones that didn’t knit right. Of pills, wine, and arthritis, and being yelled at in front of strangers, and having to lie to her friends. Of blackouts she might never wake up from, and of her father’s voice, which she had started to forget. Mary felt, in this moment, the gravitational force of this pool—how dense and connected it was to all the craters sunk into others.
This was the message, then. All along she had heard it, but had never dared comprehend its true meaning. She, too, had been frightened by the gravity and depth of what had to be done.
“Rick,” she said suddenly, still staring at the spot on his thumb. How like a spiral it was, opening into another dimension.
He bridled with annoyance, and Mary realized he must still have been talking.
“I’m so sorry,” she added, casting her eyes down. “It’s just awfully cold out here, even with the fire. Would you mind terribly, running up to the house to fetch my big coat?”
“Wouldn’t it have been smarter to bring it out here with you in the first place?” Rick grumbled. But he set his scotch down and lumbered to his feet. Nothing pleased him more than playing the hero when he felt like it.
“I’m really sorry,” she said again. “I just didn’t think it would be this chilly.”
“It’s the middle of December, Mary,” said Rick. He reached down and pinched her cheek, not gently. “When are you going to learn to think for yourself?”
Mary lowered her head.
She kept her head bent that way, loose hair shielding her from view, as Rick’s footsteps crunched away over the snow. Once she heard him disappear up the hill, Mary took a handful of pills out of her pocket and dropped them—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten!—into his drink, and stirred it with her pinky. One pill for each swollen finger!
The wonderful thing about games, she thought warmly to herself, feeling snug despite the night’s growing chill, is that anyone can play them.
Soon Rick returned with her coat, and the two of them huddled by the fire’s glowing embers in the last moments of the dying year. Both finished their drinks.
Before long, Rick’s eyelids began to droop. His big bear-like head nodded.
“Shit,” he slurred, weaving slightly. “I’m a lot sleepier than I thought. I might not make it to midnight.”
Mary patted her lap invitingly. “Come lie here and rest.”
He flopped against her, wafting the scent of expensive booze into her face. Rick always said good scotch was wasted on Mary because she didn’t have a sophisticated palate. And maybe he was right—she thought that shit smelled like gasoline.
As the hands on her little gold wristwatch ticked over into a new morning, Mary listened to Rick’s snores, and below that, the soft breath of the wind blowing snow across a sleeping landscape. The fire burned down low.
After an hour had passed, when Rick’s breathing was very slow, Mary cautiously eased out from under him and got to her feet, wincing as her knees cramped. She really wasn’t getting any younger. There were not so many years left now to do what she wanted.
Rick lay wheezing on the plaid blanket. Mary bent, gripping a corner of the fabric in both hands, and tugged with all her might. Slowly but surely, Rick and the blanket slid across the snow toward her. He snorted and gurgled horribly, but his eyes stayed shut. Mary repeated the procedure, managing to advance another few feet. Rick outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds, but the ground was icy and sloped the right way. She had more than enough strength to drag him all the way down to the edge of the lake.
Not a ripple stirred the black water, but its depths reflected back the starlight. Mary stood for a moment, staring at that reflected sky—at the beauty and frailty that could be destroyed with a tossed stone.
Then she turned and threw her whole weight against Rick, rolling him unceremoniously off the blanket into the snow. He pawed slackly at her legs, and she had to fight, even to the last second, to disentangle herself from his grasp. At last she broke free, and shoved him with all her remaining strength toward the dark, unfolding water.
A thin stream of drool unspooled from Rick’s lips as he flopped heavily downhill. His body made a satisfying splash when it fell into the lake.
The dark water shivered and seethed around him, like a slumbering beast waking up.
Rick, too, came gasping back to life. He bellowed and thrashed, not seeming to know where he was, or why he suddenly felt that sinking sensation his wife knew so well. Mary watched as his hands—which had seemed so massive and imposing mere minutes before—now groped, pitifully small, along the shoreline, clutching at fistfuls of snow.
She raised a fur-lined boot and kicked them back down into the lake.
Mary resisted the urge to say anything petty, cruel, or nostalgic at this, the moment of her liberation. It wasn’t all about her. The signs had converged, and Mary knew the true reason she’d been brought here. Here, Rick was to have his final reckoning—not just with her, but with the water. With the shores he had decimated. With nature, who always endured long enough to have the last laugh.
And so Mary was silent as she watched Rick drift across the lake, writhing feebly. He choked on black water, retching it up in an inky spew. His heavy body bobbed and spun like a can of Campbell’s tomato soup, shaggy head plunging repeatedly below the surface of the lake. Each time it came back up, his coughing was weaker, and his arms beat the waves back more sluggishly.
The black lake lapped excitedly at the shore, licking Mary’s boots. She stepped back a bit just to be safe.
It took longer for Rick to float to the middle of the lake than it had ever taken any of the other things Mary had thrown in. But float he did. No matter how much he flailed, or coughed, or spewed incoherent obscenities at the indifferent night sky, Rick drifted inexorably across the black lake toward the middle, just like everything else.
Mary thought of all the times in her life when she had known something bad was about to happen, and been unable to stop it. This was the glorious opposite of that. Something good was about to happen. Something revelatory. She had been wrong to imagine her life meant nothing to the black lake.
Now, as she watched Rick struggle, suspended at last above the dark, voracious mouth of his ancient enemy, Mary knew that above his head, the great low-hanging oak blotted out the stars.
Good, she thought. There will be no light, where you’re going.
There was no grand Wagnerian ending for Rick. He sank in silence, with only the belch of a massive air bubble as fanfare. Mary watched the rising bubbles fade until they became ripples that bled outward from the center of the lake to meet the shore. Then, the water was still again. Smooth black, it winked with starlight.
Mary winked back.
She kicked snow over the last traces of the fire, then gathered up the remaining picnic supplies and threw that into the lake, too. She felt blessedly unencumbered as she trekked back uphill to the house.
Rags greeted her with wags and kisses, ricocheting around the front hall like he hadn’t seen her in days. Mary locked the door behind her, noting that Rick’s wallet and keys were still on the table. She nodded pointedly toward the leopard statue, who still kept watch—yes, all would be attended to, in time. She just needed a little rest first.
Rags trailed her to the sofa, where she collapsed, dragging her mom’s knitted afghan off the back of the couch and over her legs. She let her eyes drift shut. After a minute, Rags jumped up and settled himself comfortably in the hollow behind her knees. He knew he was allowed up on the furniture when Rick was gone.
Before sleep overtook her, Mary made a list in her head of the things that still needed doing. Husbands left every day, but they took certain things with them—their wallet and keys, for instance. You couldn’t forget that, or folks started looking at you funny. She recalled the fate of the man from Gail’s story, who’d been forced to sell his house and leave the area in disgrace after his brother’s mysterious drowning. Mary certainly didn’t feel like having to move out of her house! Not when she was just starting to feel at home here.
There would have to be more trips down to the black lake, more offerings to subsume beneath its sheltering darkness.
Still, Mary would manage. She’d had a lot of practice managing, and under much worse circumstances than these.
Soon her breathing slowed, and the warmth of Rags’ body against hers made Mary feel safe and anchored. She’d find a way to maneuver Rick’s car—that gas-guzzling fucking Humvee—down to the lake, just as soon as she’d had a little nap.
Andar Wӓrje is a queer and trans writer whose work has appeared in magazines such as The Malahat Review, The Literary Review of Canada, Grain, Room, Event, CV2, Descant, The Dalhousie Review, carte blanche, New Words, and Open Minds Quarterly, and in anthologies including Acceptance: Stories at the Centre of Us (Engen Books, 2021). He lives and works in Port Moody (BC, Canada) on the stolen lands of the Coast Salish peoples.