“There’s something down there!” he yelled. He’d flailed his way to the side of the pool, pulled himself up, and scuttled away from the edge as fast as he could. “Something grabbed me!”
“That was me, dumbass,” Lexie said. “You’d been under too long.”
“No! This was before! Something had me by the ankle. It was pulling me down!”
“There’s nothing down there, Ryan,” Lexie said, swimming to the edge. “I’m sorry about what I said. About Rita. I was just…”
“Look!” Ryan said, pointing to his ankle. There, on the pale gooseflesh skin above his right ankle, were three red scratch marks, blood coming to the surface.
“I gotta go,” he said, throwing on his T-shirt and sneakers. “Creepy-ass pool!” He’d practically run home.
“You’re such an asshole,” I told my sister. She was taken aback. I never called her names like this. She looked at me like she wasn’t sure who I even was. “What? Why?”
I took a step closer to her, my face only inches from hers. She smelled watery and metallic. “Did you grab him?” I’d demanded, a fierceness in my tone that I didn’t recognize.
“No! I mean, I grabbed his wrist for a second—I was gonna pull him up, but he swam up on his own.”
“Swear to God?”
“I swear! It wasn’t me. I didn’t touch your stupid little boyfriend.”
I scowled at her, furious. I thought back to the wish I’d made to the pool once: for her not to be the special one, for things to be harder for her, for something bad to happen. I looked at the black water and was angry with it, too, for never granting my wish.
We stared at each other for a few seconds, me with all the anger I could muster, and her with a look of bemusement.
“So if you didn’t grab him, what did that to his ankle?”
She shrugged. “He probably scraped it on the side of the pool. It’s so dark. Being under for a long time, down deep, you get disoriented. You see stuff that isn’t there. Imagine things.”
And hadn’t I imagined that I’d seen things down there? A flash of white that I’d thought for a split second was a pale hand—but it was only a reflection.
Lexie added, “There’s nothing in that water except what we bring in with us.”
It was a phrase I thought about every time I got in the dark water. And it came back to me now as Ryan said, “It’s a huge house for one person. Way out there with no neighbors. You’re not staying there, are you?”
“I am,” I admitted. “But Ted’s with me now.”
He looked at me for a long time, like he was waiting for me to say that he was right, it was a creepy place and I shouldn’t be staying there; no one should.
“You know,” he said at last. “It’s hard not to blame myself for what happened. She was in here every morning. She’d go for a run, then end up here. The last few times, something seemed off about her.”
“Off in what way? Manic?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure. She just seemed… jumpy. Off. But not off the wall, talking a mile a minute. This was a different Lexie.” He paused, looking at me. “A scared Lexie.”
The only time I’d ever seen my sister afraid of anything was the day when Ryan hadn’t come up from underwater. Fear just wasn’t typically part of her emotional repertoire.
“We had this stupid argument,” he said.
“Argument? About what?”
He shook his head, looked away. “Nothing really. Like I said, it was stupid. But she went away in a dramatic huff—you know how she could get—then didn’t come by for days. I should have checked in on her. But I didn’t want to piss her off. When she first got here, she was into having visitors, letting people come and use the pool. Then she closed everything up. Put up all those no-trespassing signs.”
“Do you know what changed?” I asked. “What made her shut herself away?”
“Can’t help you with that one,” he said, looking away. “I have no idea.”
Even though he was a grown man now, I could still read him like I’d been able to when he was a little boy. I knew, without a doubt, that Ryan was lying. I just didn’t know why.
