Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (45 page)

The van was parked behind the cottage. Poul ran to the front, his breath coming in great whoops. Empty lounge chair. Sand toys on the beach. A child’s life vest lying next to the boathouse. No sign of her. He yelled, “Savannah!” as he went through the door onto the porch.

Leesa sat at the kitchen table, eating a sandwich. “What’s wrong with you?” she said.

“Where’s Savannah?”

“Puttering around in that raft I bought her. We had a heck of a time finding it.”

“I didn’t see her!” he said as he ran out of the kitchen.

Out front, he scanned the lake again. Boats in the distance. No yellow raft. He had a vision: Savannah paddling, looking at the bottom through the clear plastic. Sand, of course; she’d see sand and minnows. Then she’d move farther out, her head down, hoping for fish, not aware of how far from shore she was going. The water would get deeper. She’d be beyond the sand, where the depths were foggy and dark green. “What is that?” she’d think. A moving shadow, a form resolving itself, a face coming from below. The little boy from beneath the pier.

Poul pounded down the dock, scanning the water to the left and right. Leesa followed.

“She was right here a minute ago! I’ve only been inside a minute!”

At the dock’s end, Poul stopped, within a eye blink of diving in, but the water was clear as far as he could see. Even the sailboats had retreated from sight.

“Maybe she went to see the kittens,” Leesa said.

“With the raft? She wouldn’t go with the raft!” Poul’s voice cracked.

A bird flew by, wings barely moving. It seemed to Poul to almost have stopped. His heart beat in slow explosions. Leesa said something, but her meaning didn’t reach him, the words were so far apart. Then, a round shape pushed from beneath the pier. At first he thought it was the top of a blonde head, right under his feet, and it moved a little bit further, becoming too broad to be a head, and too yellow to be blonde. It was the raft. He could feel himself saying, “No,” as he bent, already knowing Savannah wouldn’t be in it. He tugged on its handle. It resisted. Who is holding on? It slid out. No one held it. Six inches of water in the bottom made it heavy.

“Savannah!” Leesa screamed. Then the bird’s wings beat twice and it was gone. Poul’s pulse sped up. The lake had never seemed so empty. He remembered Dad, who had stood at the end of the pier, mute, when they pulled Neal out. Now he stood on the same board.

A high voice called from the lake, a child. Poul looked up, his skin suddenly cold. It called again, and Poul saw her, lying on the diving platform a hundred feet away. Savannah.

He didn’t know how he got there—he didn’t remember swimming, but he was up the diving platform’s ladder, holding his weeping daughter instantly. She nestled her head under his chin and shook with tears. Before she stopped, Leesa arrived in the boat, and they both held her.

Finally, when Savannah’s crying had settled into a sob every minute or two, Leesa said, “How did you get out here, darling? You scared us so.”

Between shuddery breaths, Savannah said, “I didn’t mean to go so far, and I couldn’t get back. I paddled really hard, but I fell out. The wind pushed the raft away.”

She looked from Poul to Leesa, her eyes red-rimmed and teary.

“I swallowed water, Daddy. I couldn’t breathe.”

Poul swallowed. He could feel the snorkel in his mouth, the solid, leaden ache of water in his lungs.

Leesa gasped, “Thank God you made it to the diving platform. We could have lost you,” and she burst into tears herself.

Through Leesa’s crying, Savannah looked at Poul solemnly. “I didn’t swim, Daddy. The little boy helped me. He took my hand and put me here.” Savannah rubbed her eyes with the back of her arm. “He kissed my cheek, Daddy.”

Poul nodded, incapable of speech.

“He looked like the boy in your baby pictures.” She sniffed, but seemed more relaxed, her fear already becoming vague. “My eyes didn’t play tricks on me.”

Poul spent the sunset sitting on the end of the pier, his toes dipping in the lake, surrounded by the watery symphony. Aqueous rhythms beating against the wood, lapping against the shore. And fish. He sat quietly, and the fish came: a school of blue gill, scales catching the last light in a thousand glitters swirling in front of him and then were gone. Later, when the sun had nearly disappeared, a long, black shape glided by, its eye as big as a quarter, a long row of teeth visible when it opened its mouth. Poul had finally seen a pike.

He sighed, pushed himself up and found Leesa in the kitchen. She’d already put Savannah to bed in their room upstairs.

She looked at her coffee cup dully. It was almost hard to remember what he’d loved about her when they’d first met, then she turned her head a little and brushed back her hair, and for a second, it was there, a picture of Leesa when they were young. Before Savannah. Before coming to the lake had become so reluctant. The second disappeared.

He pulled a chair out for himself and turned it around so he could lean his arms on the back. She didn’t speak. Poul shut his eyes to listen to the woods behind the cottage. The air there was always so moist and living, but it didn’t penetrate into the kitchen. With his eyes closed, he could swear he was alone in the room.

“I want a divorce,” Poul said.

Leesa looked at him directly for maybe the first time in a year. “Why now?”

The low, slanting sun cut through the trees behind the cottage, casting a yellow light in the room. He knew that on the lake, now, it highlighted the waves, but didn’t penetrate the depths. Fisherman would be out, because the big fish, the serious fish moved in the evening. The evening was the best time to be on the lake, after a hard day of swimming, of hiking in the woods where he’d played with Neal, and just before they went to bed to tell each other stories until sleep took them, two brothers under one blanket lying head to head, and they dreamed.

Poul said, “When you realize a thing is bad, you’ve got to let it go or you’ll drown.”

About
the
Author

James Van Pelt teaches high school and college English in western Colorado. He has been publishing fiction since 1990, with numerous appearances in most of the major science fiction and fantasy magazines, including
Talebones, Realms of Fantasy, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Analog, Asimov’s, Weird Tales, SCIFI.COM
, and many anthologies, including several “year’s best” collections. His first collection of stories,
Strangers and Beggars
, was released in 2002, and was recognized as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. His second collection,
The Last of the O-Forms and Other Stories
, which includes the Nebula finalist title story, was released in August 2005 and was a finalist for the Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award. His novel
Summer of the Apocalypse
was released November, 2006. His third collection,
The Radio Magician and Other Stories
, was released in 2009. James blogs at http://jimvanpelt.livejournal.com