ST3.7 | "For Laura"

PROMPT: School’s out for summer, and this month at the Throw, we want stories of junior rocketeers discovering the darker side of summer break. We’re looking for noir coming-of-age tales, set against the backdrop of freedom afforded by summer recess. Keep it dark, keep it mean, but don’t glorify violence committed against children . . . it’s got to be in service to the story.

FOR LAURA

by Gabriela Stiteler

The last time I went swimming in Lake Kezar was the summer I turned fourteen. It was the first weekend in June and the lake was entirely still. Other than Mark, there was nobody around to tell us what to do. I brought a bag of sour cherries from the cabin’s kitchen, and you brought a case of cheap beer and a pack of cigarettes. We laid the bounty next to our towels and jumped into the water, fully submerged our heads, shocking our systems. When we surfaced, we gasped and then giggled, our teeth chattering, our lips tinted blue.

It was too soon in the season, but these early, secret swims were our tradition.

We retreated to our towels and settled into our routine, drinking and smoking and listening ironically to an AM station that was mostly static. With a certain amount of ambivalence, you took off the top of your suit and stared at me, as if daring me to do the same.

“I don’t want lines,” you were saying, your eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses that would have looked awful on anybody else, a cigarette hanging from your mouth, your hair halfway down your back, streaming water in rivulets.

When we were younger, you’d go into stores with no shoes and pick grapes off the bunches and eat them unapologetically, daring employees to kick you out. You’d stare down Mr. Cashone when he confronted you about the length of your uniform skirt. You’d go into the bathroom and roll it up more. That year, you’d been suspended twice for picking fights. Lately, there was a harder edge to your testing.

Sometimes I knew you better than I knew myself. Sometimes I didn’t know you at all.

“Aren’t you worried Mark will see?” I asked.

Mark. Your stepfather. To whom much was owed. Who brought us out to the lake for long weekends, who took us on kayaks and let us drink beer and played songs on an acoustic guitar he kept on a stand in a corner of the living room, pausing long enough to tell us stories about when he was younger and wilder, tiptoeing into adulthood with us. “I saw some crazy shit,” he’d say, leaving it there, our minds twisting over the many possibilities.

It seemed strange that Mark married your mom, who was careful not to make too much noise or take up too much space. Who spent a lot of time crying in her room with the door closed and the television turned up while we pretended not to hear.

Who didn’t stand a chance against you.

But then, no one did. Not really.

You shrugged, leaned back on your towel, and picked up a book by some French theologian about forgiveness. Your quick, indifferent shrugs bordered on casual cruelty. Something that, until recently, you had kept for everyone else. Sitting on the other side of it stung.

“Do you believe in this shit?” you asked. “Victimization and anger and learning to let God’s love in?”

“Sure,” I said. “Mostly.”

“You forgive your father?” You asked and lit another cigarette. I cracked another beer even though I didn’t like the way it tasted and debated saying there was nothing to forgive. But it would have been a lie and I was trying very hard to be a good person and some piece of goodness meant telling the truth.

“Mostly,” I said again.

You let the subject dangle and drop.

The sun came out. I dozed off. When I woke, the sky was pink and you were standing at the edge of the dock with Mark. There was something about how you held your body, something about his response, that I didn’t understand. Not then, anyways.

I turned away, embarrassed.

***

That night, it poured. We snuck into the neighbor’s screened gazebo. String lights flickered and somebody was playing the piano with the windows open, the water throwing the sound in unexpected ways.

“It’s beautiful here,” I said, grasping for something.

“Sure,” you said.

“I almost don’t want to go back.”

You didn’t say anything.

“Maybe we can come in a few weeks? Or again at the end of the summer?” I tried again, suddenly desperate to draw you out.

You shrugged one of those tight, indifferent shrugs and said, “Jesus. Stop trying so hard.”

“I’m not trying,” I said, my voice pitching to a whine.

“Sure,” you said. And shrugged again.

And instead of thinking about how you were there for me when my dad died, or how you taught me to ride the trails behind our houses when my mother couldn’t get herself out of bed for sadness, or how you punched Cassie Sullivan in the face in the locker room after we lost the state championship when she said some shit about me in front of the rest of the team, I was thinking about the distance that was stretching between us. Instead of letting my disappointment wash over me, like a wave, the way Sister Catherine taught me in sixth grade when I was so sick from the sort of anger that comes with a grief so strong I didn’t know myself, I said things to you that I don’t remember, even still, when I try.

And then I left. Walked out into the rain with you sitting there staring after me, saying nothing.

It was Mark who eventually found me. Who stopped the car and picked me up a mile down the road. I got in mostly because my anger had burned off, leaving me tired and wet and embarrassed.

“What did she say to make you so upset?” he’d asked. I almost didn’t hear the question over the rain and the wipers and the sound of my breathing, which was hard and heavy. Around us the windows fogged and the hair on my arms stood on end.

He felt too close.

“I want to go home,” I said.

He was quiet for a minute, his hands gripping the wheel, his face stony and solemn. And then he shook his head quickly and smiled. It was as tight and insincere as your shrugs. “Of course,” he said, shifting the car into drive and turning back to the camp. “First thing tomorrow, though. After the rain stops.”

***

When I walked into the cabin, you were in your room, the door closed, music playing.

Mark sat on the couch and I went to my room without brushing my teeth or showering. I locked the door and removed my wet clothes and packed my bag. Even then, I wasn’t sure who I was trying to keep out.

In the middle of the night, I could hear you fighting with him. About what, I don’t know.

***

I dreamt about when we were little and you would come to my house in rain boots and your swimming suit with stick-on earrings and chipped blue nail polish, your hair in one long braid down your back. I dreamt that this little version of you took my father’s hunting knife, the one he kept in the shed, that he used for field dressing, and sat under the white pine tree. You ran the blade across your palm and held it up to me, smiling.

***

The next morning, I woke to absolute quiet. The sliding door was open and you were sitting at the edge of the dock, the sun cresting over the tops of the trees, your back to me, your shoulders hunched.

Instead of leaving, which I had promised myself I would do, I went to you.

You were staring at the lake. At Mark’s body. Face-down, caught in lily pads at the edge of the shore.

I don’t know how long I stood there, staring. Waiting for something to happen. When it didn’t, I went back to the house and called for help. Then, I sat next to you in the quiet, listening as the birds started back up, saying nothing.

For this, and so much more, I am sorry.

Gabriela Stiteler (on Instagram @gabrielastiteler) is a writer based in Portland, Maine. Her writing has been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The Best of New England Crime Writing, Dark Waters Anthology, Shotgun Honey Presents: At the Edge of Darkness, and Rock and a Hard Place. Gabi is active in and appreciative of the New England crime writing community. Lately, she's been thinking about the role of silence in story-telling and redemptive character arcs.