I don’t know this garden—is it hers or mine? Is this Avalon? The tail end of the setting sun gives all the plants, every bead of glass, an eerie glow. The birds are silent; the wind has fallen. I progress in a universe that is coming apart in and around me.
I’m a child, trapped in liquid plaster. The boy’s green eyes dart at me through woods of thorns. Bodies decay, yet sometimes the worst is left behind.
I didn’t find Night Swimming. I didn’t find Constance, only remnants of her abuse. The loneliness, betrayal, the utter abandonment. It’s finally gotten to me, like they all warned me. Rob, Maxime, Frédéric, even Lowen. They are all watching me choke on Constance’s despair and mine.
I trip on a stone, fall knees first into the dirt. It hurts more than I remember when I was a child, perhaps because I was forced to be more careful, more controlled back then. I’m certain Marie-Laure’s work in the garden was to lay traps in the grass. I know this whole estate is out to get me, that I can never leave now that I know too much and not enough at the same time.
You’re losing your mind, Camille. Just like her. I cry and laugh in raspy sounds that I take to be boars in the forest, torn apart by a party of knights. I don’t know what lurks inside or outside of me anymore, what I’m observing and what I’m living. What I’m tapping into or creating. Am I this chaos? Did it all come from me?
Fire. Perhaps it’s fever; perhaps it’s all those emotions raging in me. My fingers itch and tingle; I rub them, splitting the skin open on my knuckles. It burns stronger.
Night Swimming. The lake. What did Maxime say? The magic water had the ability to cure madness. Yvain was dipped in the fountain and he regained his senses. Perhaps that’s what I need. Sometimes cold water is the best cure.
The lake is quiet, but the water is quivering even in the absence of wind. In the last remains of light, I watch bubbles rise to the surface. It can’t be boiling, can it? Like a big cauldron, ready to cook me. I dip my fingers in. It is pure cold, zipping to my nerves. Soothing, actually. Then the light dies and everything is plunged into darkness, until my eyes get used to the obscurity. It’s scary, not knowing the boundaries of earth and water, but needs must. I take my jumper off and drop it in the grass. My trousers are next, but I keep my shirt on. I need some protection from what I could find down below.
Entering the water is akin to the lake grabbing my ankles with freezing hands and pulling. But there’s also relief to it as I progress, the silkiness of the mud enveloping my feet. The water fights the fire in my body and mind. I stop and stand still, trying to muster the courage to throw myself wholly into it.
“You’re not doing an Ophelia, are you?”
A smile cracks my lips. “You know, Lila, you sure know a lot about art and literature for someone who said they weren’t interested.”
She snorts. At the ruffle of clothes being pulled off, I turn around. I can just about catch the edges of her. She’s wearing her wetsuit, black and long-sleeved. When she told me she swam at night, I imagined loops of gold and delicate knots behind her neck, perhaps Chanel’s golden double C.
I’m shaking with cold but it’s comforting to have her here. It helps me sober up, regain my senses and some bearings. “Are there pikes here?” I ask. I’m still not immersed, not properly, standing on tippy-toes with water up to the middle of my thighs. When I was little, Maman told me that pikes had inward-bent teeth, that if you tried to pull them off, you would only dig them deeper into your flesh.
Just like her. Just like this place.
“I don’t know. But I’ve seen frogs and dragonflies.”
“The fairies,” I say.
“Maybe. But also, maybe just dragonflies.”
“I wanted to be alone,” I say, but we both hear the doubt in my voice.
“We’re always alone. Both of us. I’m tired of it,” she says. “I thought you needed me. So I’m here.”
“Okay.” I take a deep breath, and I launch myself forward into the dark. For a second I float, and everything is fine, until my body registers the cold. “Fuck!”
She giggles. She set off with much more elegance than I did and is gliding past me.
We swim for a while, in a circle. It’s so peaceful. I feel the ripples coming from her, and I reckon she feels the ones coming from me. I really appreciate her presence. Night has settled like a dark feather on top of the trees. The volume of the birdcalls has gone up, nature preparing to take over as we retreat. Or should retreat. But we stay.
It does help: swimming in the darkness, nothing to focus my eyes on, my body wrapped in this cold embrace. Alive.
“I understand why you enjoy doing this,” I tell Lila.
“Do you?” I can’t see her, but her voice sounds close, as our arms and legs displace water in circles. I imagine us from above, two human frogs not going anywhere, just being. She continues, “Did I tell you I nearly drowned in here once? I didn’t want to leave and I waited until I couldn’t feel my legs. Then I couldn’t get myself to the shore. I thought about letting it happen. But then, at the last possible second…something kicked in—I fought and got myself out. Every time I get in my car, I fool myself into thinking I could drive away and never come back. That’s why I was late picking you up at the station the day you arrived. This time, I mean—yesterday, I thought that was finally it.”
“Why wasn’t it?”
“Because I’m trapped,” she says simply.
“How?”
“If I could tell you, I wouldn’t be trapped.”
“What do you need to be free?”
“I don’t know,” she says, after a moment. “I just don’t see it. Everywhere I look—there’s only walls.”
“I used to feel like that. When I was younger. Do you not have…anyone you can go to? Any family?”
“I have four brothers. But we haven’t been in touch for a long while. My parents—they always waited for me to become the daughter they wanted, not the one they had. It’s not a bad thing to have those expectations removed. I miss my younger brother Samir though. He always had my back…”
She trails off and she must mean until something happened. Was she really homeless? Unless she means until Maxime.
“I think my mother didn’t want me at all,” I say. I hear Lila stop herself from protesting, and I’m grateful for it. “Then I discovered art and it helped.” Did she just scoff? “Swallowed some water?” I ask sarcastically.
“Camille, as you know I’ve been watching you closely these past weeks. Art doesn’t seem to have helped you. More the opposite.”
I can’t see her face. I don’t know how close she is, her voice bouncing on the water like skipping stones. As I swim, a fight rages in me between exhaustion and exhilaration. It strips away some of the complications, some of the overthinking. I wait until I’m sure I want to say it. “You know the sculptures here are not by Sorel, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
It infuriates me that she knew. That she was complicit in the whole thing from the start. The pond gets a few degrees colder, but I realize it’s because I’m burning hotter. “You made a fool of me. You could have told me. You could have helped.”
“Camille, what part of trapped makes you think I had any power to do that? I tried to help—with the note. Now that you figured it out…”
“I told Maxime I knew it was him, but he still won’t show me his work. I need to see the workshop. I need to figure out how his craft is so bloody brilliant that I nearly thought it was her, that he makes me stronger every time I tap into it… I hate that I can only seem to be capable when he’s around.”
There’s a silence. “You think it’s Maxime who gives you access to it?”
“It all started with him,” I say. “Then he was the one who helped me figure out my power. That I can start writing my own story. That I might be special.”
“Ditto,” she says.
“Lila…you know I’ll help you,” I say. I’m pretty sure my lips and nails are blue. But I don’t want to get out and feel my body weighted by gravity just yet. “If you really want to leave. Anything you need. If you need a place to stay, or—I know a few women in my field who’d understand; they could help you find a job.”
Her hand catches my forearm out of nowhere. She was so close, all along. “Wait. Can you see this? Below.”
Under us, there’s a glow. Cold white crystal, the shape of turrets. As I stare down, it’s like looking through panes of thick ice.
“I can see it,” I say. We’re both like crows surveying the castle, the reverse of D’Arvor, from the sky, squinting into the dark depths of the lake.
At once, my mind opens and I can feel them. Their minds join mine and Lila’s. Anne and Constance swam here, and their memories are still here, trapped in the molecules of water, embedded in the moment. They made this vision of the sunken castle with their imagination and wished it into reality, and I let them join us.
Look at the stars—below they tell a different story.
I’ll sculpt us a world, Anne. A world upside-down, where we can make our own rules.
Where we can make our own freedom.
Our world beneath the lake.
A castle with our own rules—you, me, and Erwan.
“They swam here. This is the sunken palace they dreamt of,” I tell Lila. “Constance and Anne.”
A silence. “I feel them too.”
I tell her what I found out earlier. How it doesn’t feel right that Constance would have tried to hurt her own baby, or that Anne would have taken him.
“Perhaps it was her husband’s doing?” Lila muses.
“Raymond? He’s nowhere. I haven’t seen him, found him in any of her work.”
“Sometimes that can be worse. Sometimes it’s the person who kept quiet that holds the truth. The one we didn’t even pay attention to.”
“I think I need to accept her life will always escape me. Maybe I need to let it go,” I say. “Let her be.”
A pause. “For what it’s worth, I think they really were friends. I think they loved each other very much, Anne and Constance. We felt it in her sculptures at the museum—that was real. And I feel it here. This was their place. Their Avalon.”
“I agree.”
“Maybe we should dive down and go live there. Maybe that’s our escape,” Lila says.
“We shall be ladies of the lake, together, making our own rules.” As we whisper to each other, our voices echo theirs, and I don’t know if we are still Camille and Lila, or Constance and Anne.
“I would love that.”
“Lila… you know I could make this happen. I mean…we could escape to Avalon. We could go back to the museum, pick one of her sculptures. A happy one. Stay there forever. See what happens.”
A beat, then the spell breaks for both of us, and I’m relieved when she says: “Tempting, but I think I’m still too committed to this reality. And I think you are too.”
Then a cramp takes hold, and I realize my body is getting dangerously numb. “Better go back.”
I remember what Lila said. I nearly drowned in here. Something we have in common. I wonder if Viviane spoke to her too.
And there’s that other soul, who was nearly taken. The wind brings me snippets of him.
I want to swim like you, Mummy. And Auntie Annie.
Erwan! Erwan, oh my God…
I try to catch it, but it is fleeting, like a dragonfly. The moment, the print of that tipping incident, and the sunken castle, have gone. Silently we return to the heaviness of our earth. Hearing Lila’s movements, I wonder if she, like me, is struggling to pull on clothes over her wet skin. They keep catching as if my body is now covered in scales.