1989
The house moves with my sister’s exit. A long shudder rolls through the floorboards and rattles the doors in their frames. We all feel it. The motion of it is sickening. I shut my eyes and press my body to the wall, soften my knees to ride it out. Aftershocks come next. The house contracts, beams and joists tightening into a fist, balling up around me until it feels as if it will crush. Then release. Air whirling, space opening up.
Toast barks from the front lawn, smart enough not to come inside. His voice grows hoarse.
Loneliness is left. A deep hurt of a thing that knifes into me and wiggles around, trying to open me wider, and I wish for the contraction again, the closing up that felt much more like love.
The house groans and then is still.
“Where is she?” Carrie asks. “B.B., where did she go?”
The answer hits me like another earthquake: She’s gonna jump. That’s what’s happening next.
“She’s going to the Killing Pond,” I say to Carrie, who is holding on to the newel so tightly her knuckles have gone white.
“Why?”
The question comes out of Ms. Sonia, but I can tell that neither she nor Carrie needs an answer. Carrie, in particular, doesn’t need to know how much of Henrie is now monster. A mother will die for her baby.
It occurs to me then—still in the house, across from the spot where it opened up to swallow Henrie—that maybe we were always leading to this, and maybe it will work. Henrietta will save me from drowning, tell them all that the island is toxic, and that we will leave as a family. It is the hope that my plan of escape is somehow working that gets me out the front door and into the dark.
Carrie and Ms. Sonia follow me. Toast runs beside me. They know this land and the quarry, but not nearly as well as I do. They fall behind. Inexplicably, the night has come. It has gone from daylight to dark with no moon or stars in a matter of minutes. Like whatever sucked Henrie into the wall has taken on the whole world. I cannot find the moon even though I know it is supposed to be there. There is texture to this dark, like trying to part a curtain.
I cling to the fact of the quarry all around me. The scrape of rock on my legs as I climb down into it. The limestone sticks out shard-like and honeysuckle twines into loops that catch on my feet. I fall, palms and knees hit rock.
“B.B.!” Carrie calls in the dark.
“Keep up!” I shout back, and rise to my feet.
I run. My muscles remember the land. I move quickly through the dark, knowing that if I fall, I will get back up no matter what. The water is on my ankles before I realize how far I’ve come. The cold soaks into my sneakers, and I reach my hands out into the dark as if there will be something or someone there to feel. There is nothing, but the sky brightens as I reach for it, as if I’ve caught my fingers on a string, switched on a light.
“Where is she?” Ms. Sonia is next to me now, out of breath. Carrie is holding her hand.
They break from each other to stand apart.
Toast barks once, and I point before even looking, knowing Henrie will be there, and she is. High above us on the quarry cliff. My vision becomes focused. Clearer than it truly is. I can see my sister up there so crisply and clearly that our distance from each other shrinks. I can see her legs slightly separated, her toes just over the edge. Her hair parted so it falls over both shoulders. As I watch, she raises her arms into a T.
“Oh my god,” Ms. Sonia says, seeing Henrie and Henrie’s intent all at the same time.
“She won’t,” Carrie offers.
“She’s going to,” I say.
Carrie calls out Henrie’s name. I want to tell her to shut up—You don’t know Henrie—but I can’t get the words right even in my head, and I know too if Henrie jumps, she will hit underwater rocks and she will die.
“Fuck,” Ms. Sonia is saying, and she is off. Moving to climb the cliff, as if there is any scenario in which she has time to reach Henrie before she jumps.
I watch Henrie bend her knees. I see her ready herself. There is fear in her. It is tiny, but I see it there all the same. She raises her head to the sky and howls away that tiny bit of fear, lets it fly up to the moon. My own knees bend. I wade in, knowing I will swim to her, wherever she hits. She will be broken, but we can heal her. Lungs can be cleared. Bones can be mended. We are the Volt sisters. The two of us more powerful together. It can be done.
When Henrie jumps, I start in.
The splash of the water around Henrie’s body is barely a sound.
Toast and I paddle forward, our heads above water. My feet kick rock. Behind me Carrie is wading in, crying, hollering. Useless.
I find Henrie’s hair first. Long and tangled and so like my own that I am momentarily disoriented. Toast scratches at my arm, and I have to push him back so I can catch my fingers in her hair and pull. I find her shoulders next, her arms. She is facedown in the water and I fight to flip her. At least get her eyes to the sky, her nose to air. But I can’t do it. I can’t get enough of a grip on her and stay above water. I’m tired. So tired. My feet pump harder to keep me upright, and below us something is rising up. A thick dark thing that has threaded up through the hole at the deep bottom of the quarry pond. If it reaches me, whatever it is, before I can get ahold of Henrie, we will all die.
I grab Henrie’s wrist—I’ll drag her to shore. Carrie thrashes just behind me, her words shallow with panic, asking, “Do you have her? Get her behind the shoulders.”
“Get out of there!” Ms. Sonia screams from the shore. She can see what’s coming, feels it as it begins to rumble the island.
Henrie’s fingers twitch. Her arms adjust in the water. And then her head begins to rise out of the water. Slowly at first. Like maybe it isn’t really happening. Just the back of her head moving until her eyebrows are up, arched over liquid. She keeps coming. Her pupils above the surface next, looking at me through thick strings of hair. Her neck bends at an impossible angle, arching long, as if it isn’t dependent on her still flaccid and floating body. She raises up until her mouth is out of the pond and moves to Toast, who is still paddling in the water. She sucks him into her mouth, shutting it around him, and before I can shout No! she is spitting him out. His body is limp, lifeless in the water. The dark thing just under our feet stops rising, pauses to give my sister time to shine. She is grinning at me. Her teeth are big, sharp, and rowed up against one another. A girl gone shark.
Her hands clamp over my wrists, and her mouth opens before closing over my shoulder. Like needles going in, and I whimper. I hear Carrie call my name this time, then Henrie and I are gone, so far underwater that I can’t see a thing. I only feel the tangle of her. I taste blood. She is pulling me down, down, down, into the deep dark of the Killing Pond. Down into the hot dark arms of the creature that has risen up to thicken the water. I claw and fight and scream. The scream lets water into my lungs, and I sink faster. She is whipping her legs around, a giant tail, and we are past the shelf where we keep our secret story, swallowed up by the dark thing that seems as easily adaptable as the water itself. Shadows slip around us in the water, breaking into sleek long bodies that circle like vultures. The rock has narrowed all around us. V-ed into the deep. Below me is the narrow hole that connects the quarry pond to Lake Erie—the devil’s doorway, bubbling up cold from the dark, and the thing that is Henrie pushes me hard toward it. My foot goes through, twisting to fit through the harsh space. She gives me another great shove and my calf goes through into lake water.
Pain rockets through me and Henrie lets go. Turns and heads to the surface in a hot flash. I am stuck. Left to plug up the island. My uninjured leg dangles somewhere out there, a worm on a hook. Panic rises up over pain. I twist and push and kick. I use my arms to pull at rock around me. But I am stuck.
I am fading. The water lives around me and in me now. Carrie is coming. I know Henrie has gone to get her and is dragging her down, readying to shove her next to me. Stick us where we can rest. I am thinking of Ms. Sonia, whom I love. She may make it out of this. She climbed the cliff. She is out of reach. Henrie is back again with Carrie held tight to her chest. Carrie does not struggle, but she is still alive and awake in her daughter’s arms. Our eyes meet. Then, in the dark water just above our heads, there is a new monster. Made of hair and teeth and muscle, and it swims faster than Henrie.
The big thing that is not Henrie or not fish, not human, not a creature I could even have imagined, snags Carrie away from Henrie, then dips down to pull me free. My leg rips from the rock, skin left behind, but I don’t care. We bullet to the surface. The thing growls at the circling shadows, and they shiver and regather into one great dark that pools back together. The lava in the lamp.
Carrie and I are on dry land, coughing water. Objects follow liquid and come up from deep in our guts. My body hurts everywhere, but then there is air, and I suck it in. When I can, I look up. Henrie is onshore with us, looking sad and small and bedraggled. Carrie is weeping. Ms. Sonia is dry, climbing down toward us.
“She tried to kill me,” Carrie says.
It’s a stupid thing to say, and so I want to say something snide in return: Yes, Carrie, I was there, and she tried to kill me first. Who the fuck does she think she’s talking to, but then I see my father. Somehow, he is here. With us. He is almost naked. Water falling off his body. His beard wet, his arms shaking. He stands next to me. Puts his hand on my head.
“You pulled us out?”
He nods and asks, “Carrie, can you walk?”
Carrie doesn’t answer.
“Carrie!” he bellows, and she says something that sounds like “Yes.”
“We have to get Henrie away from here. Now.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious. Far from here. Off island. You cannot come back.”
Carrie nods.
“Beatrice.” My father kneels down to wrap me in his arms. It hurts, but I don’t say anything. I don’t want him to stop, although I don’t fully understand what’s about to happen. “You and me. We’ll stay. Watch the island. For your sister. Can you do that with me?”
I nod.
“Good girl. We all need to forget this. All of us.” His voice has gained volume so that Ms. Sonia and Carrie take notice. “Agreed?”
Everyone nods.
My father moves to Henrie. He whispers in her ear. She does not move. She stays bagged into herself, blankly staring.
Out in the pond Toast’s body floats swollen.
“Come.” He gestures for us to gather around Henrie. “She needs you,” he says and shows us how to put our hands on her—skin to skin—and then he moves back, away from Henrie and away from us. Carrie and Ms. Sonia shut their eyes. I do the same and a warm breeze begins to whip around us, cozying up under our arms, easing through our fingers, settling into our laps until it feels like there are more of us. Dark, warm woman shapes, dozens of us, covering Henrie with our hands, our hearts. I am sure, suddenly, that my mother is among them, next to me, her body warming my side.
We pour ourselves into Henrie. Our memories. Our strength. In the cold gloom of the quarry, that curtain I felt us pushing through earlier turns into a blanket that drops down over us, warm and soft. Our muscles relax, loosen, and readjust. Minds grow fuzzy. I try to grab on to the fear, the memory of Henrie in the pond, but the image won’t stay. Toast. His fuzzy little body runs across the quarry floor, happy and alive. Away from the water. I try to conjure up the worry, the terror, but as I grab hold of its tail, it slips out of my fingers. Gone.
Henrie’s body loosens under our touch. I open my eyes to see that she is looking at me. Eyes open, blinking. I lean in to press my forehead to hers.
“B.B.?” she says to me.
“I’m here,” I say.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
I search for an answer but find that my brain is sleepy. One thought won’t connect to the other, and I wonder if we are all asleep, dreaming, even though that idea doesn’t make sense either.
Our father steps forward to gather Henrie up in his arms. Carrie stands.
“Daddy,” I say, but he is looking down at Henrie as she rests her head on his chest.
The moon slides its light down on all of us as we move into our different dreams. Even when the rain starts, dropped in handfuls from the barely born morning sky, it is easy to see our individual paths move away from one another, and part of me knows we are doing something wrong. Daddy means well but he’s got this part wrong. We need to stay together, our hands on each other, warm and bright. But the night is blurring and the pain of being alone cuddles into my rib cage, too strong to fight.