“You’d die if you held your breath that long,” I warned.
That whole summer, and every summer after, my sister practiced holding her breath and diving down into the darkest part of the water.
“It’s stupid, you know,” I told her. “You can’t really swim to the other side of the world.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Because I just know. And you should, too. You’re the one who gets straight As in science.
“So?”
“So the earth has layers of rock and at the center there’s a fiery core—even I know that.”
She gave me this pitying look and dove back under.
She said sometimes, when she was deep, it was hard to tell which way was up. But she never managed to touch the bottom. And she never got to the other side of the world.
“Until now,” I said to the pool.
My chest felt empty and hollow, my limbs impossibly heavy. If I were to fall into the water, I knew I would sink down, down, down. Tears blurred my vision, matching the rich, mineral smell to the damp air.
Before my great-grandfather built the house, Gram used to say, people used to come to the springs to bathe and drink, and claimed the water had healing, even magical properties. They came before the hotel was built, and then, once the hotel went up, they came by the trainful.
Some people said the magic was good, but some stories we heard in town, passed down over generations, warned that the springs were cursed: If you came to the water looking for a miracle, you had to be prepared to pay a price. When we asked Gram about these stories, she laughed and said they were nonsense, even gently boxed our ears and warned us not to listen to such tall tales.
“Maybe it was the curse that killed poor Aunt Rita,” Lexie hypothesized when we were alone.
Cursed or not, people still believed that the water healed. A constant stream of visitors came to Sparrow Crest each summer: ladies Gram knew from church, old friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. They wanted a quick swim or to fill bottles, swearing the water helped their arthritis, their headaches, their gout. Sometimes, we’d hear the visitors whispering to the water, talking to it like it was a living thing. They’d leave little gifts, too. I’d seen an old man dumping brandy into the water, and Gram’s friend Shirley leaving flower petals scattered over the surface.
It seemed silly to me, but Lexie really believed that the water might have some kind of power. She said we should each drink the water every day, just a few sips so our magical abilities could surface.
“How will we know if it’s changing us?” I asked.
“Maybe we won’t. The biggest changes happen so slowly you hardly notice them.”
The water tasted like burnt matches and old rocks. Sometimes we’d find dead frogs floating, and I imagined that’s what the water tasted like: the green skin of the ones who weren’t able to get themselves back out. I looked around now but saw no frogs, thankfully. We’d snuck down to the pool at night to tell it our wishes, too. Lexie had wished to be a better swimmer, and me, I’d wished for a terrible thing.
I blinked away the memory, looked over the pool and across the yard where Lord’s Hill and Devil’s Hill loomed like sleeping giants, casting long shadows, the trees so dark green they looked black.
A yellow-and-blue inflatable raft drifted, unmoored, at the far end of the pool. Two wooden lounge chairs were on the stone patio. There was a wrought iron table full of glasses, some half-full. Other objects were scattered around the edge of the pool—a box of crackers, a plate with bread crusts, an ashtray with the remains of several joints, mason jars, a coil of rope, an empty wine bottle, a blue nylon bag that had held the inflatable raft. And a box of spilled crayons—the big, fat kind, like the ones I kept in my office and pulled out for the youngest children.
I soon saw what Lexie had been using the crayons for: The stones around the edge of the pool had markings on them, in multiple colors. Letters along the short edge of the pool (A through T), and numbers along the long edge (1 to 45), evenly spaced at about a foot apart and separated by short, roughly drawn lines. A grid. Lexie had been studying the pool.
I walked around to the other side to get a better look at the raft. There were plastic oars inside it, and a net. And a long coil of rope with markings on it. I looked closer—not rope. It was more like an oversized, super sturdy measuring tape, with meters and tenths of a meter marked in red and black, up to 50 meters. A small loop at one end had a metal weight tied to it, a bit bigger than a golf ball and teardrop-shaped.
Now Lexie’s coded messages made sense: She was measuring the depth of the pool using the grid and weighted measuring rope. But why? I shook my head. Trying to explain Lexie’s behaviors with logic was a losing battle. My phone rang, the sudden noise and vibration from my back pocket making me jump. I’d forgotten I’d tucked it back there. I pulled out my phone and looked at the screen. Karen Hurst, the social worker helping out with my clients while I was away.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Hi, Jackie. I’m so, so sorry to bother you at a time like this, but I’ve got a bit of a crisis here. Apparently, Declan Shipee went into school today and dumped a gallon of bleach into a fish tank full of trout? His teacher tried to stop him; he threw bleach on her, got some in her eyes.”
“Oh Jesus, no,” I said. “He called me yesterday and left a message. He sounded… off. But I’ve been so caught up in stuff here, I haven’t had a chance to call him back. How’s his teacher?”
“She’s going to be okay. No permanent damage. Sounds like he’s burned his bridges at the school, though—they’ve asked him not to return. Declan’s mom came and got him. I spoke with her over the phone. She’s furious and blaming the school for what happened.”
“She’s fiercely protective of Declan, to the point of denial sometimes.”
“I’m seeing Declan first thing tomorrow,” Karen said. “I’ve been going over your notes in his file to get a little background. Other than the heads-up about his mom, do you have any additional thoughts or advice?”
