I can’t wait to be submerged. Home again to where this one Great Lake is cold and impossibly clear. I have been an inconstant lover, leaving and returning sporadically. But the lake could never miss me the way I miss it. Besides the slight bit of heat it’s drawing from my body, it is indifferent to me; whereas I try to embrace it over and over as I wade in. It drips from my puckered skin.
About seventy yards out, the water is well over my head. I look down at my body dangling under the surface in milky, translucent underwear. I can see my clothes in a dark pile on the empty beach. I haven’t considered what I might do if someone comes along—someones so rarely do. My tiny car—its engine hot from the long drive, its trunk still full of my bags—is parked out of sight at the side of the two-lane highway next to a small green sign that says Great Lakes Circle Tour. But I feel as if this shore, this lake, must be my secret. Under me I can see the sand perfectly repeating the same ridge all the way to shore. The sun in the water looks tangible, shattering against the bottom and zagging everywhere. This is a show only the three of us could put on, sun and water and human eyes.
I will be thirty shortly. I have forty-five years left. Perhaps more, perhaps not nearly so many. That isn’t a lot of time, really, and I have been courting the wrong beasts: water, sunlight, summer, married boys with sparkling eyes embedded with pieces of myself. Which of these could I squeeze in my lined palm until its breakable bones hurt? I want something that is mine, that stays.
This beach has always been here, hasn’t it, its boulders on either end, soft; sand stretched across its middle? At least, for an “always” I can imagine. This is the same beach where he carried me down to the water, cried into my jeans. Where my dog, who’s now dead, left her fierce, running footprints; where my sister and I as girls dug tunnels in the sand until our hands met as our hands never meet now; where I walked back and forth every summer for seventeen years, dragging my toes in the sand, studying the line where water thins to damp nothing and land swells up into pebbles, then sand, then blade, then road, then tree to infinity; where stones have waited patiently on shore to be roughly stroked by waves into sand or to be plucked one by one for their greenness or their pinkness or their deep glitter or their fossilized creatures and taken home to dressers and gardens where, once dry, they will inevitably disappoint. Would I like to say I have learned to leave these stones behind? I am almost thirty. I know the drill. I will take a few with me when I leave.
People might find them in a box or a wooden bowl some day when the water has dried from my hair and the freckles retreated from my skin and my veins have collapsed and my hands no longer clench around the things I thought might save me. They might throw out my sweaters, receipts, old notebooks, but they might like the weight of these rocks in their hands, they might want to take them home.