Lake Madeleine is farther from civilization than I expected. After the exit from the freeway, we’ve only been driving for a few minutes down the narrow, tree-lined road before I feel a shift in the air, sparking against my skin like an electrical current or the first hint of rain. Patrick’s in the driver’s seat; the tree branches cast a shifting veil of shadows over his skin.
It’s been years since I left the city. The slender trunks cluster close together and, glimpsed just beyond, more trees and then more, rolling out like an ocean.
This morning, I rescheduled my upcoming encounters at the Elysian Society, shifting everything aside for the next two days. I’ll lose some of my regulars. My clients love me for my predictability, the way I’m always waiting on the shelf. This is the first time in five years I’ve betrayed them by denying them access to their loved ones.
I should feel guilty over this. But every time I try to imagine my life beyond the next few days, my mind finds blankness. A wall of fog, as if my future has been steadily rubbed away.
“Are you afraid that the people here will remember you?” I ask.
“You think that’s going to be a change?” Patrick asks. “The only people who remember are stuck way out here?” His hands on the steering wheel tighten.
The water shines through the trees in a quick, dark glimmer.
“Anyway, I’ll use a fake name,” he says.
I look at him, but he’s still gazing ahead, expression distracted. After a second, I decide that he didn’t mean anything by it.
Patrick guides the car into the parking lot. Only a few other vehicles share the space with us. I wait in the car as he goes to the front office, taking in the curved strip of grainy beach, the single-file row of triangular cabins glimpsed through the trees. The cabins’ gray siding is weathered too cleanly, like props. On the boat rack, the bottoms of the boats stand out like blanched rib bones.
In the daylight, Lake Madeleine is beautiful. Gemstone blue, sun-gorged and glittering. From its banks, the trees feather upward in a gentle slope, or sink back to shadowy alcoves. There’s a brutal innocence to the water’s beauty, as if it doesn’t understand its own dangers.
A shadow falls across my lap; Patrick taps on the window.
Following him down the path that winds through the trees, I study his body. We’ve been civil with each other since last night. Polite but distant. Two strangers bound by something bigger than either of us. We slept next to each other without touching. When Patrick’s hand brushed against my arm as he reached for a glass this morning, we pulled apart as if we’d received a shock.
Only two cabins display any signs of life. Crumpled sunscreen bottles on the porch railings, next to the damp neon of draped towels. In a window, the blinds lift in a crooked arc. Each time I think we’re going to stop, Patrick keeps moving. Then I see it. The second cabin from the end of the row. It’s identical to the others, with its A-frame design and the outcrop of the porch. The steps are dusted with pebbles. I veer toward the cabin as if I’ve come here a thousand times, my muscles guided by an automatic impulse.
Patrick calls my name; I stop, confused. “We’re the next one,” he says.
“I thought we’d be staying in the same one,” I say. Only a few yards away, the lake laps at the bank, patiently rolling over the grasping twigs and pale pebbles. “The same one as that August.”
“This is the one we stayed in,” Patrick says, gesturing ahead at the last cabin of the row. When I don’t answer, he says, “Edie, trust me. I remember.”
When we enter the cabin, I stop in the doorway. Nobody else has been inside this space since Sylvia and Patrick left two summers ago. The cabin holds the oversteeped stillness of a house in a ghost town, shrinking at the sudden intrusion. Once, it must have been quaint: a dutiful honeymoon suite. A glass butterfly hangs over a fireplace, wings fuzzed with dust. The floral wreath above the sofa breathes out the memory of sweetness. Each separate piece of furniture, each decoration, feels immovable inside its own space, like a wasp preserved in amber.
Patrick pulls up the shades. Dust rises into the air, a glittering veil in the sunlight, then drops and vanishes. In the generous light afforded by the huge windows, the place shifts back into ordinariness.
I move down the narrow hallway that opens beyond the kitchen. Three doors spread out along the left side. I open each in turn. A small pastel-colored bathroom, the shower encased in frosted glass; a closet; and the bedroom. White walls, floral coverlet, a spidery antique bed frame.
I was so sure that I’d find the bedroom from the photograph, ready to reveal its secrets. Instead, I’ve found this unfamiliar space. It’s like a cruel magician’s trick. The other bedroom must have been here as I approached, dematerializing the moment my eyes touched it.
When Patrick comes in a few minutes later, I’m curled on the bed. I’m silent as he lies next to me. As his weight shifts the mattress, pulls me closer into the dip he creates, I think: this is the last space where Patrick and Sylvia spoke together in their own voices. The last space they touched each other with their own bodies.
Turning, I rest my hand against Patrick’s chest. The rapid rhythm of his heartbeat fills my palm.
He shifts until he’s above me, pinning me on the bed. His hand moves down my stomach and lifts the hem of my dress. When he touches me, I’m amazed at how immediately he stirs up desire, a pinch deep beneath my skin. I hold myself back with an effort. It’s as if I’m hanging in a corner of the room, watching two strangers.
But the faster my breath comes, and the surer his touch grows against me, the more fully and firmly I sink back into the shape of my flesh. At the same time, Patrick transforms back into himself. The man he was when I first met him. I cling to him, finally, wrapping my arms around his back, feeling the quick, easy movement of his muscles.
Afterward, we lie breathless, staring at the ceiling.
“What is it like to be here?” I ask.
Patrick pulls me against him until my skull nestles against his jaw, clicking into place like a puzzle piece. “Strange. Not strange.” A pause. “It’s like everything that happened between then and now hasn’t even been real. I’ve only been waiting to come back.”
From outside, a burst of laughter punctures the silence of our bedroom.
“Patrick,” I say. “What really happened, that night?”
His hand strokes a slow circle on the small of my back. “You know what happened,” he says. “I came here with my wife. We wanted to spend time together. Get away from it all. One night, she went swimming alone. She wasn’t a drinker. She wasn’t much of a swimmer. So I lost her. A stupid mistake,” he says. “And I lost her.”
“There’s more to it than that,” I say.
Patrick doesn’t answer.
“You didn’t want anyone to investigate her death,” I say.
His hand on my back slows and then stills.
“You couldn’t look at her after she died,” I say. “You couldn’t look at your own wife. You’ve withdrawn from everybody in your life. You can’t explain the room in the photograph. And people—people heard fighting. Shouting. The night Sylvia died.”
Patrick’s breathing is low and even against my belly. “How do you know all this?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say.
“You’ve gone behind my back.” He doesn’t even sound angry. “Is this what you meant by letting you in?”
The truth is that there’s more than what I’ve said. This spread of accusations is only a thin layer floating over the true evidence: the dark beat of another woman’s heart in my chest, the sticky caul of her presence that clings to the folds of my brain.
“Things weren’t perfect between me and Sylvia.” Patrick’s voice buzzes from his throat into my scalp. “When you love somebody and you’re afraid you’ll lose them, it can change you.”
I shut my eyes. “I know that,” I say.
“No, you don’t.”
I’m quiet.
“How could you?” Patrick asks. “You don’t know what it’s like to lose someone. I’ve spent every waking moment with you and you’ve barely told me anything about yourself. You’re just—” His grip on me tightens.
I open my eyes to find Patrick looking down at me, searching my features as if he’s trying to recognize someone who’s been gone a long time. “You’re not my wife,” he says, half wondering. “You’re not even yourself.”
I don’t move. “Do you want her?” I ask.
His pupils expand, spreading points of darkness. Fear or desire—I can’t untangle them. He shuts his eyes. “No,” he says. “Right now, I just want to sleep.”
I watch Patrick until the heaviness of his breathing and the droop of his lips convinces me that he’s gone. Only then can I sleep. I’ve been holding my exhaustion at bay, and now it’s huge, rushing over my head and taking me down.
But there’s space for one thought to slide swiftly through my brain, carried in on eddies of sleep. When Patrick told me I wasn’t myself, what I felt wasn’t rage or humiliation or even loss. It was a deep sense of comfort.
I wake. The light in the bedroom has shifted from thin afternoon brilliance into the density just before sunset. All the shadows in the room are slanted, as if cast by a lamp knocked on its side. I sit up. The bed next to me is empty. I touch the sheets: cool under my fingers.
“Patrick?”
No response.
I slip my dress back over my head, the sheer folds briefly muting the world. Going to the bureau, I kneel next to the lowest drawer and slide it open. I reach inside. Emptiness. The next holds only a Gideon bible, a folded hand towel. I’m not certain what I’m searching for. All those nights I’ve woken up on my bedroom floor without explanation: there must be a reason, trailing behind the events. But I reach the final drawer and find it empty.
For a second I see myself. A ridiculous woman in a too-young dress, kneeling on the bedroom floor. Looking to patterns in dreams, sifting through the leftovers of someone else’s tragedy. Hoping to find answers in benign and meaningless places because I’m too afraid of looking directly into the source of pain.
I stand up. That photo. Her body on the bed in the lustrous lipstick, her naked body, the directness of her gaze against mine.
In my mind, her body transforms. Her skin blue-tinged, the hollows of her hands and her fingertips thickly dimpled, her features darkened with veins of rot.
I walk out into the threadbare light of the evening. Standing on the porch, I look across at the cabin next to ours. It’s set back farther into the pines, retreating from the water. The windows holding the particular darkness of an empty house at sunset, as if the shadows inside are a solid weight pressed against the glass.
My feet carry me across the strip of grass and up the stairs. My approaching reflection sharpens in the front window as I approach, like a face slowly emerging from underwater. When I push my shoulder against the door, it gives way easily.
The inside is nearly identical to the other cabin. Only a few details are switched. The windows facing the opposite direction, a landscape painting instead of a wreath. The back of my neck goes cold and buzzing.
I already know what I’ll find behind the final door on the left. I switch on the light and the bedroom is revealed. The darkness of the bedspread, the lines of the walls. It’s the room in the Polaroid. The one Patrick claimed not to recognize.
She must be here. Passing the bed, I drag my hand over the slick fabric. Her shampoo on the pillowcases, inky hairs woven into the fine tapestry of dust and detritus along the baseboards. Phosphorescent fingerprints on the bathroom faucets and the drawer pulls.
Crouching, I slide the empty drawer out of the dresser, leaving a gap in the row. I lean down, head bent against the side of the bureau; I reach into each corner, groping at the floorboards. My fingertips brush against something. Small and sharp-edged. I manage to slide my fingers beneath the shape, drawing it loose.
A photo. The displaced companion to the one that still lies inside my apartment. A Polaroid; the same blocky border, this one dust-darkened.
That picture with the lipstick was my first introduction to Sylvia’s mystery and her hidden ferocity. Here, finally, is the second scene. The next step. The room around me takes on strange dimensions, reflected back at me in the photograph. Like nesting dolls. The room within the room, the space around me and the past version of it trapped and shrunken. Sylvia on the bed, so vivid that I could turn my head and see her.
And him.
The source of the shadow, stripped to his flesh, exposed, finally, at the core of her life. Henry Damson. Sylvia’s laughing, naked. She’s on her knees, as if caught while changing positions. The mirror exposes the curve of her back, the rope of pearls of her spine. In the reflection behind her, there’s a clear view of Henry. Shirt unbuttoned. His smile beneath the mask of the camera.
I know where to find him.
It’s dark now. The moon is gauzy, partially hidden by clouds. The stars are starting to spread in little puncture wounds. The lake seems to throw off its own pale, fractured light.
I walk along the rocky shore, then onto the path that winds through the trees. The coating of pine needles slips under my bare feet, a few of them cracking beneath the weight of my soles.
The trees seem to draw closer as I go deeper and deeper, venturing farther from the negotiable sense of civilization back at the cabins. The insects and tree frogs create such an overwhelming layer of shrieking and pulsing that I feel hidden by the noise.
It takes me twenty minutes to reach him. Patrick sits near the water, back against a tree trunk. He’s on a small tongue of land that extends from the main path. He doesn’t seem distressed; he could be transplanted here from a hazy summer day, surrounded by crowds of people. Only the chalky spotlight of the moon reveals the scene’s true strangeness. He doesn’t startle when I come up behind him.
A floral memorial wreath hangs on the tree trunk. The flowers are stiff fabric, the cruelly cheerful yellow of birthday cake icing. Its tattiness stands out. Layered water stains, petals torn and shedding.
“This is where they found her?” I ask.
A long moment passes before Patrick answers. “One of her friends must have left that,” he says. “Or her parents.”
From this point, there’s a clear view of the lake. The expanse between us and the opposite shore is vast. Next to the enormity of the water, the wreath is inadequate. This attempt to take Sylvia’s death and condense it into one discrete marker.
I sit beside Patrick, careful not to touch him.
He turns to me finally. “You know,” he says. Calm, but leaving no room for argument. “Sylvia had the same look on her face, that night.”
“Patrick,” I say, “why didn’t you tell me?”
“You’ve never trusted me,” he says. “You came into my home, you slept with me, but you started doubting me. So you drag me here to find out what happened.” He looks back at the water. “As if finding out will fix anything.”
“You’re the one who wanted to come to the lake, Patrick,” I say. “Not me.”
“None of this was your idea,” he says. “You’ve been careful about that. When I first left the Elysian Society, you pulled me back. You made it look like my idea. I should have known then. I should have run.” He leans his forehead against his fist. “I’ve wanted to end this. Sometimes I’m disgusted by the whole thing. Every time, you’re right there, convincing me to stay. You won’t let go.”
Even in this moment, I want to reach out to him. Some vitality in Patrick has diminished since I met him. Or maybe it’s a transformation inside me, the spell ripped from my eyes to reveal him in his true form. But despite everything, my fingertips are restless with the desire to stroke his hair off his forehead.
“Seeing a person the way they really are—it’s not simple.”
“What did you do to her?” I ask.
Patrick smiles, quick and indecipherable. He holds out his hand and opens his palm, as if he’s going to release a trapped firefly. In the gloom, my brain lags before I can make sense of what I’m seeing. A lotus. That thin white pill, more familiar to me than the air I breathe.
A heart-sized knot swells in my throat. I watch my hand reach out to accept the pill. Patrick’s eyes are on my mouth as I slip it between my teeth. The world is still and deep and quiet. In the moonlight, the boundary between the water and the land is a thin glowing stripe. I imagine sliding my fingers under that edge, lifting the water open like a trapdoor and slipping down into a light-filled space.
The pill is heavy on my tongue. I swallow. Before I’m even gone, I can feel her stepping into my skin. So easy now, so expected. Like a woman pulling on a glove. I’m not being chased from my skin. I’m relinquishing it to its true owner.
I’m gone, gone, traveling through the body, the bulging knots of the spine and the red swimming thump of organs, the underwater whish-whish-whish of the heartbeat. Silence.
And then nothing.