Well.
On Wednesday morning, Carol went swimming.
On Thursday morning, they searched her home.
On Friday morning, they put out bulletins.
On Saturday morning, they brought out the dogs.
On Sunday morning, they dredged the lake.
But they never did see her again.
***
Ellen said it was all her fault anyways, as they ate sandwiches made with dry brown bread and sad bologna. “You don’t swim in the lake,” she told them. “My grandmother said that. It’s not safe.”
“Why?” asked Sarah, who asked annoying questions like that.
“Yeah, why?” asked Josh, who’d never met a bandwagon he hadn’t boarded.
“Because it isn’t safe,” said Ellen loftily, who was the oldest by two months and knew it and knew that they knew that.
“Are there sharp rocks?” asked Sarah.
“Are there sharks?” asked Josh.
“Are there currents?”
“Are there giant octopuses?”
“It isn’t safe,” repeated Ellen. “You’ll understand it when you’re older.”
And they didn’t, but they thought they would, so that was all fine and done and it was back to comparing mustard with mayonnaise for another few years.
***
On Monday morning, Jeff went fishing.
On Tuesday morning, they called his friends.
On Wednesday morning, they filed warrants.
On Thursday morning, they interrogated suspects.
On Friday morning, they went out in boats.
But they never could find out what had happened.
***
Sarah’s mother held the wake at her house, which everyone said was very brave of her and she nodded and kept a stiff upper lip and cried in her bedroom when it was over where nobody knew, not even Sarah.
“He was so careful,” Sarah was telling Ellen and her grandmother, who was made of driftwood with beach-glass for eyes and a tumbled bun of waterweed hair. “He always wore a lifejacket.”
“Jackets can come loose,” said Ellen’s grandmother. “Or not be fastened properly.”
“He had his whistle around his neck,” said Sarah.
“Necklaces can come loose. Or be snapped.”
“He promised he’d come back for lunch,” persisted Sarah.
Ellen’s grandmother reached out with one long, wave-beaten arm and stroked her hair with softness. “Promises can break,” she said. “Or be false.”
Sarah didn’t even wait to get to her bedroom. Josh brought her little trays of snacks until she stopped on the outside, and on the inside she kept along for a few more years.
***
On Saturday morning, Helen went for a walk.
On Sunday morning, they searched the trails.
On Monday morning, they combed the hills.
On Tuesday morning, they dug through the beaches.
On Wednesday morning, they turned searchlights on the water.
But nobody knew where she’d gone.
***
“She went down to the water,” said Ellen with a sigh. “By herself. At age eighty-seven. Why do some people get so stubborn? When you’re old you can’t be too afraid to ask for help.”
“But what’s so dangerous about walking by the water?” asked Sarah, who hated this conversation almost as much as studying for exams but not quite. It had been a long time since Jeff went fishing.
“Yeah,” chimed in Josh, who was upside-down against the wall reading his book wrong-way-up.
“It’s harder when you’re old,” said Ellen dismissively. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“You said that about the lake and then you never told us,” said Sarah, unhelpfully.
“You’ll understand that when you’re older too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah right.”
Ellen threw a pillow, missed, and hit Josh, who fell over and landed feet-first in Sarah’s breadbasket, and they were all much too busy to think of this sort of thing for quite a few years.
***
On Thursday morning, Josh jumped from the dock.
On Friday morning, they took his computer.
On Saturday morning, they talked to his professors.
On Sunday morning, they asked his doctor.
On Monday morning, they kept looking for a body.
But there still wasn’t one to be found.
***
They were quiet around Sarah at work for weeks, and she spoke loudly to fill the space. Managers told her she could talk to them, and she smiled and refused to. People gave her carefully-written condolences and she took them with a light heart and dropped them in her trash.
Ellen and her grandmother came to visit a little later. Ellen was taller; her grandmother was shorter but still remarkably unwrinkled and very polished by the world and its weather. They ate crackers and drank cool water from large glasses.
“He wasn’t going to do that,” Sarah told them.
“You never know,” said Ellen, nodding wisely.
“People can change,” said her grandmother. “Or be secretive.”
“He was like that in his freshman year,” said Sarah. “He told me. I helped him, and helped him get help.”
“He never wanted to trouble you again,” decided Ellen.
“Problems can reappear. Or resurge.”
“His medication had been stable for two years,” said Sarah. “He’d just gotten engaged.”
“Life is funny that way,” mused Ellen.
“You can’t understand everything. Or maybe when you’re older.”
Sarah drank her glass of water. Two months didn’t seem like so much anymore, she realized.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.”
***
On Tuesday morning, Sarah went boating.
On Wednesday morning, they found her boat.
On Thursday morning, they arrested her boyfriend.
On Friday morning, they released him on bail.
On Saturday morning, they brought out sonar.
But not one thing appeared.
***
The teeth that snagged at Sarah pulled her down, down, down, clamped hard. But they didn’t reach through her clothing, which was layered for the fall chill. And the bottom layer was a wetsuit.
The water that closed over Sarah turned blue, bluer, black, dark as the dead zone at the lakebed where nothing breathed. But she was safe from it, because around her back was packed a rebreather, and around her neck hung the mask. And her fingers were fast.
The bright sparkling beach-glass eyes that swung at Sarah from the dark on the end of the long, muscular neck were invisible and hungry. But that was why she had the little stick with a magnum cartridge loaded into its tip, which she swung into them. And the eyes vanished, and so did the teeth beneath them, and the neck swung free and wild and empty.
The teeth in Sarah’s clothing tried to peel loose and a sad moan filled her, so long, so tragic, so empty. But Sarah had done her crying in the living room years before, and in a sheath at her side she had a knife, which she pulled it out and resheathed it behind her over and over until her arm ached. And the wailing stopped.
It took a long time to break the surface, for the black to turn into bright cheery blue, a different blue from a different day than she’d gone under. Time is funny at the bottom of a lake, and doubly so when you’re trying to avoid the bends.
Sarah kicked back to shore with her feet, arms still aching. She watched the sky and she understood now.
But not because she was older. Ellen had been wrong about that.
***
On Sunday morning, the water was calm.
On Sunday noon, the sun was warm.
On Sunday evening, the sky was ablaze.
On Sunday night, the stars were bright.
Come Monday and it all happened again.
And over and over and over.