Sadie was pointing at a white buoy bobbing gently in their path. A few yards past this, another buoy rose above the surface like the head of a turtle. From what Kris could see, there were five buoys in total, not in a straight line but seemingly placed at random around this section of the lake.
It took a moment for Kris to realize why.
“The houses,” she said quietly. “They mark where the houses are, the ones flooded by the lake. So boats will know they’re there. So they won’t run into the roofs if the water is too low.”
Gripping the metal edge, Sadie carefully leaned over the side. Her eyes widened. Her jaw dropped open.
“Wow,” she whispered.
Kris slid over beside her. Just like her daughter, she held on to the side of the boat as she peered into the water.
At first, all she saw was her own reflection, her auburn hair falling down around her searching eyes, and for a brief moment, she was sure it was not her face she saw in the water but that of another girl, staring back at her.
Then, beneath her reflection, a shape began to take form.
Like the tip of an enormous arrow pointing up at them.
“I told you,” she said.
She squinted, peering deeper into the depths.
A thick layer of dark green algae covered the roof of the house. At its base, patches of pondweed waved slowly as if tossed by an underwater breeze. Silver torpedoes shot past the collapsed brick chimney as a school of perch swam by. Beyond this, farther down a gentle curve that had once been Lower Basin Road, the dark shapes of two more roofs pointed toward the surface.
“Were there people in them? When it happened?” Sadie asked. Her voice was surprisingly even. There was no fear or horror. She was asking out of pure curiosity, the way an adult might ask about the weather.
Kris slowly shook her head. “No. No, the people weren’t home, honey.”
There was a jolt and the entire boat shuddered, the side of the metal hull screeching angrily as it slid along the plank lining the dock.
They were back.
Kris dropped the oar handles into the belly of the boat and quickly looped the mooring rope around the first piling. She gripped the side of the dock with one hand, holding the boat steady, and grasped Sadie’s arm with the other.
“Careful.”
She waited until Sadie was safely on the dock before standing. As she did, she felt the bottom of the boat give slightly under her weight. A shallow pool of water appeared around her foot. She gave a gentle bounce, and a crack in the rusty hull revealed itself just a few inches away from the toe of her shoe. More water rushed in, swirling the remnants of mud and dead leaves into a light brown soup.
Jesus, she thought. What if we had been out on the lake when this happened? What if the entire bottom gave out?
You didn’t even bother with life jackets. It was the chiding voice, the scolding voice.
“Can I go inside?” Sadie asked. She was already backing off of the dock and onto the path leading up the slope to the lake house.
Kris nodded and exhaled a barely audible, “Yeah.”
The calm she had felt at the center of the lake, the peace she had experienced for one exhilarating moment, was evaporating. The day felt oppressively hot. Her skin was sticky with sweat and dirt.
She watched as Sadie reached the top of the slope and hurried up the back steps to the deck. She heard the sound of the French doors opening and closing.
To her side, something bobbing in the clear water below the dock caught Kris’s eye.
It was the black beetle she had spotted when they first got to the boat, the one that had been trying desperately to crawl up the slick metal side.
It was dead. Drowned. It floated on its back, its crooked legs jutting into the air at odd angles.
Kris watched as the rippling water slowly carried the dead beetle under the dock and out of sight. And then the water settled, the surface of the lake becoming smooth and still.
True to its name, the E-Z Lite charcoal went up like a Christmas tree in February. Within twenty minutes, the flames were dying down into a mound of orange coals dusted with pale gray ash.
From the great room, a bouncy guitar, one of the most famous riffs of all time, drifted out through the open French doors. The ragged voice of Warren Zevon began to sing.
“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand …”
For the past forty-five minutes, Kris had been on the back deck, cleaning the charcoal grill, stripping its legs of spiderwebs, dumping ancient ashes from its basin into the towering weeds below the deck, scrubbing clumps of incinerated grime from its grates.
It was finally ready for them. For their summer.
Four dogs went rolling onto the grill with an angry hiss. It wasn’t long before their skin was beginning to blister. Hot, clear juice spurted from jagged splits in the charred casings.
One by one, Kris jabbed the hot dogs with a fork and nestled them down into buns lined up in a row on a paper plate.
Sadie had managed to move from the armchair inside to a seat at the bistro table on the deck. She stared out at the still waters of Lost Lake, its surface reflecting a purple sky.
“Here we go.”
Kris set the plate down in the center of the table, flicked open the top of a squeeze bottle of Heinz ketchup, and ran two red strips down either side of a hot dog, just the way Sadie liked it.
Without a word, Sadie picked up the hot dog and took a small bite from one end.
Kris held her breath. Watching. Wondering if they would have a repeat of lunch, with Sadie immediately losing interest in her food.
The little girl chewed the bite slowly, swallowed, then took a larger bite.
Good enough, Kris thought.
From inside came the softly strummed chords of an acoustic guitar and the longing voice of David Gilmour.
“So… so you think you can tell … heaven from hell … blue skies from pain …”
Kris reached over and swept a spiraling strand of hair out of Sadie’s face. She watched as Sadie took another bite, even larger this time, shortening the hot dog to half, and listened to the gentle smack of her lips as she chewed.
“Did you like coming here when you were a kid?” Sadie asked suddenly after a moment of silence.
“Yes,” Kris replied. She paused, thinking, then said, “That room upstairs, that was my secret playroom. I used to pretend it was a place where only I could go. No grown-ups allowed. You had to believe in magic to pass through the door.”
“And grown-ups don’t?”
“Believe in magic?”
Sadie nodded. She was staring into the empty space before her, her brow furrowed as if she couldn’t imagine ever outgrowing something so sacred.
Kris let out a sigh. “It’s hard, Sadie. You know, life …” She let her words drift away before taking a different route. “When you’re little, you tell yourself you’ll always remember what it’s like to be a kid. But the truth is, most grown-ups forget. They get busy with work and family and bills and all of those grown-up things that seem to take up every minute of every day, and they forget to look for the magic.”
“But it’s still there?”
Kris thought, I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. It might dry up and disappear forever like a puddle of water on a hot day. Or maybe it was never there in the first place.
What she said was, “Yes. It’s still there. If you believe.”