9

Seven Years Old

“Time to take the leap, honey.”

Salem can tell Vida is losing patience because her mom only refers to her as “honey” when she’s trying not to yell. Anyhow, she could call her Wonder Woman and Salem still isn’t going into that lake.

“No.”

“Please? Momma’ll make sure the fish don’t bite you. We’ll only wade in up to our knees.”

It isn’t the fish that Salem is worried about, or at least, those are a new addition to her concerns. It’s the water itself, the huge, black expanse of it, sun sluicing across the top to reveal a poisonous pool of mercury. Salem knows better than she knows her own name that if she steps into it, into any body of water where she can’t see the bottom, no one will ever lay eyes on her again.

She’d been born knowing that.

It wouldn’t be an easy death. There’d be a swirl of silt, and then something horribly cold and muscular would wrap around her ankle and tug her down, down, down into a chill so inescapable it’d freeze her heart. In the final, terrible moment of consciousness, she’d see her mom above the water, just out of reach, the sun haloing her head, safety, love, and home cruelly just beyond Salem’s grasp. She would struggle and fight to reach Vida, open her mouth to scream, and the evil water would rush in to fill her lungs, pop out her eyes from the inside, steal her voice and her life.

There is no question in her mind that she can’t enter the water. She pushes the afro of soft curls out of her eyes and repeats herself. “No.”

Vida takes an angry drag off of her Virginia Slims 120. She cut quite the figure with her thick black hair tied up in a Pucci scarf, oversized glasses, skin a tawny brown that a Midwesterner couldn’t obtain with all the baby oil and summer sun in the world. She still has her accent, too, a faintly exotic lilt from spending the first ten years of her life in Iran.

“We didn’t drive all this way to sit in the cabin,” she says.

The “honey” has vanished, both the word and the tenor.

Salem rubs nervously at the webbing between her thumb and pointer finger, trying not to cry. “Daddy wouldn’t make me.”

“Daddy isn’t here, is he?”