Lost Girls (2 page)

''I want to stay up here. For the summer not to end.''

''But it
does
end. It gets cold, the lake freezes over, and there's no TV.''

''I don't care. It just makes me sad that we can do this, now--all this stuff together--and soon I'll be back home and you'll be back home, dealing with all the dickheads at our schools and whatever. It's just shitty, that's all.''

''I know.''

''And I miss you. I mean, I know I'm going to miss you.''

''Yeah, I know.''

''I wish . . .'' she exhales, but doesn't continue. The boy knows what she means, and that she is a girl full of wishes.

As they near the beaver dam she pulls her paddle in and turns around to face the boy. Smiles, tilts her head back to absorb the last heat of the day's sun. The boy studies the galaxy of pale freckles that crosses her chest and clusters in the space above her small breasts. Her hair, red-brown in winter and blond in summer, falls straight back and reaches down almost to the water. She makes a low moaning at the back of her throat and stretches her legs out in front of her, wriggling her toes until he quietly brings his own paddle in and grabs them.

''And these little piggies got barbecued!'' he cackles, and the girl screams, famously ticklish. Then she comes forward and kisses him.

''Kissin' cuzzins,'' she says.

''Wait. Let's get to shore first.''

The boy maneuvers them in the last twenty yards to the river's mouth, into the reeds, tape grass, and coontails. Once he steps out onto the shore he takes the girl's arm and half guides, half lifts her to where he stands. As their feet sink into the softness of the river's edge the smell of rot rises out of the ground, the decomposition of fish and slug and frog.

''Ugh. Stinks like shit!'' the girl shrieks, though the boy knows it isn't that, but the stink of dead things.

''They're getting ready to eat.''

The boy squints back across the water at the miniaturized figures of the adults, who are now ambling up to the picnic table and fetching more drinks. Once they leave the sunny spot by the lake they disappear into the shadows, just as the boy and girl, if you were to look for them from where the adults had sat, are concealed by the lengthening darkness.

''Should we go back?'' the girl asks.

''Are you hungry?''

''No.''

''Then we'll take our time.''

They sludge along the water's edge to where the beaver has blocked a narrow point in the river with twigs, fallen tree limbs, even a found section of hockey stick, all held together by dried mud. The boy walks a few feet out onto the dam and extends his hand for her to follow. Beneath his feet the passing water sucks and gurgles, the meshed-together wood creaking under his weight.

''No! Get off! It's the beaver's house!'' the girl calls to him with a mixture of protest and delight.

''C'mon. Don't worry. It's abandoned. It's gone somewhere else now, so it doesn't matter,'' the boy lies. He knows nothing of beavers or which mushrooms can be eaten in the woods or how to tell compass directions from the stars, but he tells the girl stories about all of these things.

''Really?''

''Yes.''

''Promise?''

''Promise.''

The girl takes his hand and steps up beside him, close enough that he has to circle his arm behind her back to prevent her from falling in. Her breath, sweet smelling and spicy as cinnamon, warms his neck.

''C'mere,'' he whispers, although she can move no closer. Then he lowers his head and kisses her, moves his tongue inside her mouth and his hands to her hips to hold her in place. They have kissed before, but this summer things have been different. They felt different. But one thing that's the same is that when they kiss he keeps his eyes open and she closes hers. He likes this almost more than the smooth invitation of her lips. To watch her eyelids come down like sleep so that he can watch her pleasure without being seen himself.

When they pull apart they hold each other still for a time, each listening to the other's shallow breaths. In the single moment of their silence the dusk has begun its advance. From the blackening trees behind them lights appear, pinpricks of color. Without a word the boy and girl watch them emerge, fireflies flashing through the branches and high grass. Hundreds of flickering communications moving forward from the woods.

''It's like they're
talking
to each other,'' the girl says.

''It's beautiful. Nice.'' The boy counts to three in his head.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi
. ''C'mon, let's get back in the canoe. It'll be more comfortable.''

The boy turns and picks his way back from where they have come and when he steps off the dam he wonders if the beaver is out there in the woods, watching them.

''Let's go!'' he shouts back to the girl, and she turns to follow. When she meets him at the canoe she climbs in first and then he pushes them off, his feet making a foul suctioning sound in the mud as they go. Without speaking they slowly paddle around the river's mouth, watching small pike, rock bass, and tadpoles flash through the water at the disturbance of their wake. Then the boy directs them out into the open lake and, once they reach the middle, stops and pulls the paddle in. Watches the perfect stretch of her back, the soft crease of skin at her sunburned neck.

''Hey,'' the boy says, and the girl turns to him, placing her paddle next to his.

''Hey what?''

''Hey, you look amazing. Here, in the light.''

The boy moves forward, steadying the canoe with his hands on the sides. Then he kneels before the girl, cups her face in his palms. ''Amazing.''

He kisses her hard and she makes a sound, an indeterminable sigh of submission or resistance. As his fingers go to work--pulling, pressing, positioning--he holds his mouth over hers to keep her from speaking. But eventually he has to pull back to arrange his own body into the right angle, and when she opens her mouth it's not to say
Don't
but ''Please,'' her voice constricted with panic. She asks him to stop without calling him by name--just
please
--for to the girl he was no longer her cousin but something else, a wild, rabid thing, like the bear she'd once seen frothing and wailing down by the landfill before the provincial police shot it through the skull.

''Don't move. You'll tip it,'' the boy whispers. But she doesn't want to move. What she wants is to lie so still it makes him stop. So she closes her eyes, stiffens her back straight over the jabbing aluminum ribs of the canoe's hull, and imagines herself floating on the perfect line between water and sky. But still there is his breath, his strong fingers, the weight of his thighs pressing down on hers.

For a moment the boy stops and she opens her eyes to see him scrabbling with the clasp on his shorts and the zipper below it. With a grunt he falls back and pulls them down, ripping the seam and kicking them off his feet onto her chest. Then he comes forward again and brushes his mouth next to her ear.

''C'mon,'' he whispers. It's all he can think of to say. C'mon, c'mon, c'mon. He wishes she were different--older and inviting, like the faceless women of his imagination-- not this girl with bony hips and a face he knows too well pinched up in fear. He doesn't want this. He wants a dream. So he closes his eyes, fumbling with himself, and just as this and the sway of the canoe and the blooming heat within him begin to feel more like what he wants he is awakened by her screams.

He tries to shush her but she screams even more, banging the sides with her fists and slamming her heels into his back. The screaming doesn't stop even after he pulls back from her and tells her it's okay, it's over, he's sorry, he won't try it again. Checks over his shoulder in the direction of the cottage to see if her sounds have brought anyone down to the beach but he can't tell, his view blinded by the lowering sun. When he turns his head back again the girl is struggling to stand up, one hand waving in the air and the other pushing down on the side. The shadow of her cut against the dim sky, looking down at him with both recognition and horror. Then, in the same moment --in the same half moment--that she gets to her feet the canoe moves into a fluid spin that pushes them both below the water.

Cold.

It's the cold that shocks the blood in their hearts and cramps their muscles as soon as they begin thrashing for the surface. The boy keeps his eyes closed but reaches up, searching for the overturned canoe and soon finding it. With a single pull his head breaks through into the air and he takes in a hungry gasp. How long had he been down there? Five seconds? Long enough to make his chest ache. For a time he holds his arms over the slippery hull and simply breathes. Then he remembers the girl.

Calls her name once, but doesn't shout it.

Nothing.

No sound but the lapping of water against his shoulders. Where was she? Both of them good swimmers but she better than he, faster and with far greater endurance. She should have been beside him, spitting water in his face, or a hundred yards off kicking her way to shore. But she wasn't. The boy knows he has to go under to find her, but it feels so cold down there. A difference of several degrees between armpits and toes. It's the cold that frightens him.

The first time he goes down only a few feet before twisting back up, eyes closed against the imagined sight of bug-eyed snakes and glowing, tentacled jellyfish. Gnashes at the air.

On the second dive he takes as large a breath as his lungs will allow and flutters down against his own buoyancy, eyes still closed, hands reaching before him. Then he feels her. Not any actual part of her body, but the vibrations of her struggle radiating out through the water. Down, farther down. When he begins to feel the muscles in his jaw ache to pull his mouth open he tells himself to turn back but nothing obeys and he goes two strokes farther yet.

And finds her arm. Slides his hand up and bracelets her wrist with his fingers. Then he kicks like hell.

But the girl feels heavy, heavier than she should, as though attached to a sack of wet sand. A dozen sacks of wet sand. The pain that comes with the lack of oxygen now a bell tolling in the boy's head but he doesn't let her go, pushing against the weight with the last of his strength until his free arm knocks against the underside of the canoe.

Even with the leverage of his fingers locked around the hull's edge the girl is still too heavy to bring up with him. His shoulder strains, his toes brush through her hair but she moves no farther. Then he feels a tug. A sharp force from below her that nearly takes him down too. Then another.

It's not that the girl is too heavy for him to pull up. Something else is pulling the other way.

With the third tug she's gone.

The boy pulls his head through to the light, counts to two, and goes under once more.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi
. This time, when he's down as far as he can go and moves his arms out to feel for her, there's nothing there.

He tells himself not to do it, that it will be too horrible and do no good, but he does anyway. He looks.

What he notices first is that the opening of his eyes also opens his ears, because it is only then that he hears his cousin's scream. Then he
sees
her scream, her gaping mouth blowing a diminishing stream of bubbles up toward him before breaking soundlessly at the surface. But as she runs out of air her scream becomes something worse, a moaning inhalation of the lake's purple weight. Eyes a wild white, blond hair now black as oil, writhing out from her head like eels. Fingers grasping up toward the light, at him, at anything, but when they stop they are frozen into gnarled fists.

She goes down fast, but he remembers all of this.

Not sinking but pulled. That's what he sees. His cousin pulled down from the last snaking shafts of sunlight into the black, into the blind, cold depths.

There is nothing more overrated in the practice of criminal law than the truth. Indeed it's something of a trade secret among professionals in the field that the facts alone rarely determine the outcome of a trial. What's overlooked by the casual observer is the subtle distinction between the truth and the convincing of others to accept one of its alternatives.

Allow me to make reference to current events:

Later today I'm expected to complete the defense's case in a sexual assault trial where the facts are clear and they all disfavor the position of my client, a Mr. Leonard Busch. To make matters worse, counsel for the prosecution is as skillful, determined, and ambitious as yours truly. A constipated-looking young woman whose eyebrows form a piercing V when she speaks and whose every word vibrates with accusation, qualities that contributed to the splendid job she did in her exam-in-chief of the complainant. When the tears started in the middle of the girl's recounting of the night in question my opponent stepped helplessly toward the witness box, leveled a vicious glare at my client, and shushed the girl with ''It's all right, Debbie. You don't have to look at
him,
'' while at the same time stabbing a trembling index finger at my man Lenny. It was a beautiful move: theatrical, maternal, prejudicial. The effect was so damaging that I was tempted to leap to my feet and make an objection against what was so obviously a purely tactical maneuver. But in the end I remained seated, met the prosecution's eyes with what I hoped was a look of indignation and held my tongue. It's important at such moments to remember one of the first rules of successful advocacy: sometimes one has to accept small defeats in the interest of capturing the final victory.