The Twilight Swimmer (6 page)

She tried to drop Cody off at the library, but when he realized she had no intention of going inside with her, he froze. His hand on the door, his eyes wide, he stared straight out the windshield. He looked convinced that if he got out of the car, Brandi would step on the gas and peel out of the parking lot, never to return. He would have to live at the library for the rest of his life, sleeping on encyclopedia piles and sustaining himself on barely-edible magazines. The prospect terrified him, too much to give it voice. And so he sat, staring, waiting.

“I’m coming back for you in two hours,” Brandi assured him. It didn’t work. “One hour, then. One hour. You can keep yourself occupied for one hour, can’t you?”

He shook his head ‘no’, and his eyes darted toward her to see if his refusal had enraged her. It hadn’t, of course. If anything, it made her sad. “I can’t take you with me, because you can’t keep your mouth shut.”

He nodded vigorously, his lips parting so he could holler assurances of his own. Until he realized that hollering assurances would be the opposite of keeping his mouth shut. Cleverly, he pressed his lips together again and pantomimed zipping them.

“Fine,” she said, as she put the car in gear.

The warehouse fire was long since put out, no longer even smoldering. The smoke that had billowed from it so profusely in the pre-dawn hours had dissipated completely, leaving no evidence of the massive blaze but the shell of the warehouse itself.

She parked in the gravel lot, the grass surrounding it now scorched and dead.

Cody peered out his window, entirely confused by their arrival at this place. He rolled down his window and leaned out, his nose wrinkling with the smell of the burned landscape. “It’s nasty here.”

“No, it’s just… Yeah, it’s kind of nasty,” said Brandi, as she stepped out of the car.

“Where are the flowers?” asked Cody.

She had told him they were on a mission: to find wildflowers for their mother, for a surprise. Pretty ridiculous, really. But it was all she could think of at the library, hoping he would be so opposed to participating that he would choose to go inside and read for the afternoon. Instead, he had shrugged and tightened his seatbelt, ready to lend a hand for any task that didn’t involve abandonment.

“It’s the wild, Cody. The flowers could be anywhere.”

“All burned up like everything else,” he scoffed.

“You wanted to come,” she scolded. “I’m going that way. You go the other way, so I don’t have to hear you complaining.”

Cody didn’t want to go a different direction than his big sister, but he had pushed his luck enough already. He pulled headphones from his book bag and placed them over his small ears, half his face obscured, then headed farther inland. He hopped his way over some wreckage from the warehouse fire and squatted in a patch of tall grass, only his red bag visible through the stalks.

Brandi watched him for a moment to make sure he was okay, then headed down toward the water. She quickly found the exact spot on the bank where Kelly had been lying the night before.

Lifeless, until…

Lying in his arms. His mouth wide over hers. And his neck, the line below his jaw.

Unless she’d inhaled more smoke than she thought and the whole thing was a hallucination. It was time to find out.

She crouched to look at the damp, sandy ground. There was an imprint where Kelly had been lying, its contours undefined thanks to the bountiful layers of her wedding dress. A few stalks of cattail broken by her weight. Even a hole that looked like an imprint from the toe of Kelly’s shoe. But beside these indications that Kelly had been here the night before, Brandi found what she had really been looking for.

A footprint.

It was much larger than her own. The foot of an adult to be sure, and of a man. And while the shape was that of a bare foot, with an obvious depression from a heel and another where the ball of the foot pressed down on the soft earth, she was surprised to see texture. Not the crisscrossing or ridges from a sneaker or boot, but something more subtle and, for lack of a better word, organic. The shallow lines were almost like the swirl of a fingerprint. Or, she thought, like rivers on a map, running their course through wilderness, their ancient paths both predictable and unbridled. But the strangest feature of the print was the toes. There were five, a big toe and four smaller toes. But between them,
connecting
depressions. Not as deep, not as defined, but unmistakable.

Webbing.

No
. She laughed out loud. It was so silly. It was
ridiculous
.

And yet, what else could it be?

She took out her phone and snapped a series of photos, documenting the footprint from a multitude of angles. She felt like a crime scene investigator, and looked over her shoulder to make sure no one – not even Cody – was watching her at work. Then she pivoted on her own heels and looked at the path leading down toward the water. There they were, as expected. Additional prints. One was deep enough that some water from high tide had been trapped in the heel depression.

Brandi walked the path, carefully keeping parallel to the prints so as not to disturb or destroy them. She took more photos as she walked, including several shots that featured multiple prints and chronicled their course, toward the water. How many myth-lovers and conspiracy theorists had taken walks just like this one, in some Pacific Northwest forest, hunting for proof that Sasquatch was on the prowl? How many had trekked through the icy landscapes that a snowman, abominable or otherwise, might call home? She was deeply embarrassed, but her fascination was so great that she pushed the embarrassment aside and kept snapping photos.

At the water’s edge, she dropped her phone into her pocket and slipped off her shoes. She rolled up her pant legs and took a few careful steps into the water, shivering immediately at the cold assault on her skin. How could anyone, how could any
thing
, survive this cold? But that was a silly thought. Waters much colder than this were teeming with life, with fish and mammals alike. This inland and sheltered aquatic climate was positively tropical compared to the habitat of arctic seals or even the cod that used to be processed at the ruined cannery behind her. No, if the man, if the
thing
, she had seen last night was native to the water, it would hardly feel the cold at all.

She couldn’t call it a ‘thing’ or an ‘it’. She’d seen every inch of him. And even in poor light, it was obvious. It was a man. It was a
he
.

He
, then. He was from the water.

Ridiculous? Yes. But true.

She gazed down at the murky water, unable to see very deep. The remarkable transparency the ocean had had in her dream was not apparent here. She could not see even the smooth stones, covered in algae, that decorated the gentle slope of the bed. But wait. There, near the far bank. Air bubbles. Something breathing beneath the water, expelling a breath. The water was reflective, a pattern of light and dark that was difficult to negotiate visually. Was that an object beneath the surface? Was that pale flesh? And there, pushing through the surface… round and smooth… was that…?

It was only a turtle. Its smooth shell broke the surface of the water before its leathery head and neck, which it swiveled toward her. Sheepishly, she imagined. How dare that turtle do such a convincing impression of a merman.

Oh god, now she’d actually thought the word.
Merman
.

She was busily chastising herself and didn’t hear him approaching from behind.

“I found like a million!” yelled Cody, his fists and pockets stuffed with wildflowers.

Brandi was so badly startled that she stumbled forward, her foot slipping on one of the smooth rocks the murky water concealed. She twisted like a ballerina on tiptoe, swung out her arms to find balance, but instead flapped wildly as she teetered over and fell into the water. The splash was so magnificent, Cody’s fists slipped open and he dropped all of his colorful treasure on the ground. Brandi surfaced a moment later, gasping and shivering, to find Cody staring at her with his mouth agape and his eyes wide enough to climb inside.

“Cody!”

She crawled toward the bank, then found her footing and leaped ashore. Cody took a reflexive step backward, as if afraid there would be immediate retribution in the form of a wet embrace. Brandi was too busy wrapping her arms around herself to grab him, though. Her wet hair clung to her thin neck in thick clumps, like the arms of an octopus.

“I dropped my flowers,” he said with a quivering lip.

She strode past him, rushing to get back to the car.

Back at the car, Cody sat in the passenger seat with his sullied wildflower cache. He picked through them, discarding the flowers with wilted or dirty petals. Anything to distract himself from his angry sister, who was hunched over the open car trunk, still shivering. It was her mother’s car, but her father had evidently commandeered the trunk for personal junk storage. She pushed aside boxes full of papers, souvenirs, and various other items. She tossed aside a jack for tire repairs, some empty soda bottles, and more. And finally, she found a pile of clothing. Dry clothing.

“It’s all so big!” she muttered to herself, teeth chattering. The pants and shirts all belonged to her father, not her mother as she had hoped. “Don’t look!” she hollered to Cody. If he heard her, he didn’t acknowledge her voice. Hiding behind the trunk lid, she tugged off her wet clothes with great difficulty and pulled on the oversized clothes from the trunk – a pair of khaki pants and a plaid shirt she could have worn as a nightgown. Her discarded clothing was lying on the ground, no doubt collecting half the mud in the entire county, so she gathered it up in a bundle.

And then she remembered her phone.

With a gasp, she pulled the phone from her wet pants pocket and tried to turn it on. It was dead. Of course it was dead! The water had penetrated every nook and cranny of the device. If the phone was ruined, all the photos she’d taken were ruined as well.  Shaking her head with frustration, she banged on Cody’s window and held up a finger: one minute, she communicated. Then she ran down the path where the footprints had been only to find that in her haste to get away from the icy water and back to the car, she’d managed to trample every print into oblivion.

“No!” she cried.

She stomped back to the car, glaring at Cody. He pretended he didn’t notice her through the window, preferring to continue examining the wildflowers he had collected. With a groan, Brandi stomped to the open trunk and was about to slam it closed when she had a thought. She searched the trunk more thoroughly until she found additional clothing of her fathers. And with a glance at Cody to make sure he was still lowering his eyes in shame, she trotted back toward the water, her father’s clothes tucked under her arm.

The Vine family gathered, once again, around the dinner table. Brandi’s mother had apparently been watching more cooking shows, given the experimental nature of the meal: lamb chops. In a bold stroke, she had coupled the lamb with an assortment of baked and caramelized fruits, apricots and pears and some kind of berry. The asparagus was smothered in some kind of herbal butter her mother had made in their kitchen, leaving an odor so potent her father had discreetly opened all the windows on the first floor to air out the house. As if this wasn’t enough to impress her family, Brandi’s mother had also baked fresh bread.

Sherri surveyed the table with obvious pride, waiting for her family to begin eating. No doubt anticipating the compliments about to come her way.

Conrad deftly took the conversation a different direction. “The fire at the fish cannery. Could have been a lot worse if it weren’t still humid in this part of the country. Trees and bushes and all that, still green and full of water, didn’t want to catch a spark like they will in some regions. In the southwest, all it takes is warm air to set off a wildfire.”

“What’s a fish cannery?” asked Cody as he gnawed on a piece of overcooked lamb.

“Son, do not let anyone hear you ask a question like that in public. This is New England.”

“So what is one?”

Brandi jumped in, eager to fill every moment of silence to prevent her mother from directing the subject back to the meal. “All those fisherman, they catch too much to sell at the local market. The rest of it goes to factories where it’s deboned, and gutted, and cleaned and packed.”

“In cans,” said Cody. “Like tuna fish.”

Conrad and Brandi both nodded.

“Where will the fisherman put their catches in cans now that their factory burned down?” Cody asked, with real concern.

“It was out of business a long time ago, bud,” said Conrad. “Defunct is the relevant word. Edgewater isn’t a fishing town anymore, except for local consumption and the occasional tourist charter. God how the boys at the docks wish there were more dumb tourists who want to see a cod that still has its head and are willing to pay for the honor. Can you imagine? Like a cod, a piddly little juvenile
cod
, is worth a drive from the city and a bout of seasickness. Can’t exactly mount it over the mantle, can you, bud?”

Cody shrugged, his catch-all response to most questions.