I froze, heart thudding in my ears. Then, slowly, I turned and looked out the kitchen window at the pool. The surface was still and black, likea great piece of polished onyx. I pulled the curtain closed so I didn’t have to look anymore and went back to sweeping.
Once the kitchen was in some semblance of order, I headed for the living room. Pig followed at a safe distance, watching with curiosity. A quick check confirmed that all the light bulbs in there had been removed, too. In fact, some of them were not removed but smashed, the metal socket still in place along with a ring of jagged broken glass. I picked up all the dishes and cups in the living room and brought them into the kitchen. Then I started on the papers and family photos pulled from old albums. They were scattered everywhere.
Hurricane Lexie.
I studied the odd code I had noticed yesterday. A date and time with coordinates of some kind, measurements.F6: 6/9 11:05 p.m.—over 50 meters!I began to stack the loose pages in a pile on the coffee table, glancing at words Lexie had scrawled:6/10: They don’t like the light. They won’t come when the lights are on.Christ. Was she feeding animals? Or having out-and-out hallucinations? It wasn’t unheard of when her mania was at its peak. I tried to put them in chronological order the best I could. Not every entry was dated, and some were hardly legible. One read:Ask Diane about Rita’s imaginary friend, Martha. Call Jax and ask if she remembers any stories Mom told about Rita (especially anything about Rita and Martha!).
Lexie had never asked me. She would have been disappointed anyway—I didn’t have any stories to share. Mom didn’t speak about Rita. Not to me.
I reached for a paper dated June 12, five days ago:
I know what I saw. I am not crazy. This was no hallucination. I think it came out of the water.
I shook my head. Then I spotted a little square of pink paper stuck under the leg of the coffee table. I pulled it out:She isn’t who she says sheis.I held the paper, fingers trembling, remembering what Declan had told me about the fish:They weren’t who they said they were. They’d turned into something else.
I added the paper to the stack I’d made on the coffee table and reached for the next bunch. I grabbed a scattering of photocopied pages: a survey of Sparrow Crest and the surrounding property; tax records; a drawing of Brandenburg from 1865, with each property lot carefully marked—the land and springs had belonged to a man named Nelson DeWitt. There was an old map and deed from 1929 showing the location of the Brandenburg Springs Hotel and Resort, owned by Mr. Benson Harding. I found an old tattered paperback book:The History of Brandenburg, Vermont.
My sister’s research hadn’t been just about our family, but our family home, land, and town as well. There were pages and pages of journal entries, and I knew I’d never get through picking up if I stopped to read each one, so I just put them all into a pile. Some of them had neat, careful cursive; some were written in messy, hurried, childish scrawl—the way Lexie wrote when she was sick. It seemed she’d been incredibly prolific over these last months: hundreds of pages of notes and journal entries, many about the springs, the pool, the hotel, our family.
One scrap of paper dated May 27 was just a list of names:
Nelson Dewitt
Martha W.
Eliza Harding
Rita Harkness
The last journal entry I picked up did not have a date.
I remember what Grandma always told people when they asked her why she didn’t have the pool filled in after Rita drowned; how she could bear to watch her children, then grandchildren continue to swim in that water; how she could possibly still swim there herself. “Rita loved the pool,” Gram would tell them. “It’s where I feel closest to her. When I’m in the water, I feel like she’s still with me.”
My eyes went over the last line again and again, until, with a trembling hand, I set the paper down on the pile I’d made on the coffee table. The papers stood in tall, messy stacks, but at least they were up off the floor. I’d go out and get some three-ring binders and do a better job at organizing them later.
I picked up the book of town history again. It was published in 1977 by the Town of Brandenburg Bicentennial Committee. The typesetting was terrible, the photographs grainy. It looked more like some kid’s middle school project than an actual book. I opened it to the first chapter, where Lexie had left a pink sticky note as a bookmark and underlined a passage.
In 1792, when the first settlers, led by Reverend Thomas Alcott, arrived in what is now Brandenburg, they found it had been settled once before. The remains of a village long abandoned were clear—a small gathering of half a dozen cabins, pastures cleared for planting, overgrown gardens, and trash: broken bottles, clay jars, piles of bones from deer and small game. At the heart of this little village was the spring, a small bubbling pool of dark water. And there, at the edge of the spring, Thomas Alcott and his group found a rock, a broken piece of granite about the size of a man’s arm. On it was carved:prendre garde.
One of the men in the party translated:beware.
I tossed the book down, stood up, and walked away, turning my back on it.
In the center of the living room, I stood, taking deep breaths, then looked out the window, past my own reflection. I knew what I had to do next. The thing I’d been avoiding since I arrived. I walked down the hall, out the front door, and into the yard. The grass looked like it hadn’t been mown at all this year. The air hummed with the low drone of buzzing insects. I followed the path of stone pavers to the side of the house, to the gate. I undid the latch; the door screeched open. I forced myself through.
The pool was there, waiting for me; the water dark as ink. A huge, unblinking pupil.
I imagined Lexie there, floating facedown and naked. My mind went to all sorts of places: Had she been close enough to the edge for Diane to pull her out without having to jump in? Where were her clothes? They were details that didn’t matter, things I knew I would never ask Diane, but my mind was stuck on them, spinning in circles, trying to picture it, trying to make it feel more real.
When I’m in the water, I feel like she’s still with me.
The water from the natural spring that fed the pool was colder than any water I’ve experienced, before or since. The carved granite stones along the edge were stained green, spotted with moss. I could hear the water flowing through the spillway, down the canal that ran across the yard, to the stream and river. Lexie said once, “Water from our pool flows all the way to the ocean—fish out in the Atlantic are tasting the water from our little spring!”
I stared at it now, the surface perfectly still; a black mirror. Our grandmother always told us it was bottomless.
“Could I swim to the other side of the world?” Lexie asked when she was nine.
“If you could hold your breath that long, then yes, I suppose you could, Alexia.”
