Two Years Later
Emma
“Hell, yeah,” Candy said, hanging up the phone in the kitchen. She brushed her hair back from her perfectly tanned shoulders. Candy was seventeen that summer and liked to lay out on the deck, her bikini top unfastened in the back, while her new Like A Virgin album spun on the record player in the living room. She had grown out her hair that year and cut her bangs, which she wore hair-sprayed in a donut above her forehead. She patted them gently with her palm while she looked around for the girls.
“You two wanna go swimming?”
“Yes!” They were not supposed to go swimming in the pond alone, but if Candy came . . . The girls raced upstairs to get their suits.
“I thought you didn’t like the pond,” Jessie said, pulling her T-shirt back on over her one-piece.
Candy laughed. “Not the pond. A lake.”
Emma was skeptical. “Where’s there a lake?”
“Just hurry up, will you? Our ride’s gonna be here in a minute.”
And soon enough there was the crunch and spit of gravel in the driveway and a red pickup pulled up beside the house. There were three teenagers in the cab, and more in the bed, but they shifted to make room when Candy pulled the girls up after her. Once they were settled, Candy immediately transformed. She was no longer their perpetually annoyed babysitter but a bona fide teenager, talking and laughing with her friends. Jessie watched her, mesmerized, but Emma could not take her eyes from the ground that whizzed beneath them, the trees blurring along the side of the road. She hunched down in the bed, one hand clinging to her sister, the other clenching the side of the truck.
After more than an hour, they arrived at a large lake, and Emma scooted off the tailgate onto the ground, relieved. Looking toward the blue-grey water, she saw a small gravel beach, and, for the first time since they had left Baymont, she felt a thrill of anticipation. This water wasn’t the murky green of the pond, where her feet sank up to the ankles in slimy, gelatinous goo every time she touched the bottom. This water was clear and blue. Even the small, makeshift beach beckoned, with its hundreds of little stones just waiting to be skipped.
Behind her, the teenagers were leaping out of the back of the pickup, pulling off their T-shirts and shorts and tossing them into the truck. But instead of lifting down the cooler and heading toward the water, they began climbing a steep embankment in the opposite direction. Jessie and Emma stood uncertainly by the truck.
“Come on,” Candy called. “This way.” Dutifully, the girls fell in behind, clambering up the hill behind them.
Where are we going? Emma wondered, but was too shy to ask. In any case, the answer was soon clear. As they gained altitude, she saw where they were headed: an enormous dam that formed one edge of the lake. For it was not a true lake, she realized now, but a reservoir, with a giant cement wall that held the water in. It was to the top of this dam that they were going, the group now almost in single file, led by a young man with dark hair whose bare back glistened in the sun.
When they arrived at the dam, at last, he paused, turning to smile at the gaggle of teenagers that followed him.
“Voilà,” he said.
“Wow,” a girl marveled. “How high is it?”
“Fucking high,” someone answered.
“Fifty feet,” said the young man, fiddling with the drawstring on his red trunks. “And watch your language. There’s a couple of young ladies present.” He nodded toward Emma and Jessie at the back of the line.
The group tittered.
“Just jump out and you’ll be fine, I promise. It’s awesome.”
“You’ve done this before?” another girl asked Candy.
Candy shook her head. “No. But I’m going to.” Then she turned to Jessie and Emma.
“Want to wait here? I’ll come back up and get you.”
“You’re going to jump?” Jessie asked incredulously, and as she did, Emma’s stomach seemed to fall all fifty feet to the glimmering water below. For if Candy was going to jump, Emma had no doubt that Jessie would want to, too. Her sister was not one to be one-upped.
“Jessie,” she said, her voice desperate. “You can’t.”
Don’t leave me here alone, she thought.
“Come on, Emma,” Jessie said. “You heard him. Just jump out and you’ll be fine.” In her voice was a new note of nonchalance. Emma was not reassured.
She watched her sister pull her T-shirt over her head and fling it to the ground. Under it, her blue one piece stretched tight against her flat chest, her lean arms crisscrossed with scratches from picking blackberries.
“Come on,” she said again, beckoning for Emma to follow. “It’ll be fine.”
The dam was perhaps eight feet across, wide enough to walk along, wide enough that from Emma’s short height, she could not see clearly what lay below. On the left side, she knew, was the reservoir, but what about to the right? Carefully, she dropped to her knees and began to crawl toward the edge. Peering down, what she saw paralyzed her. For if the dam was fifty feet high on the reservoir side, it looked twice that on the other, the rocks and eddies so far below that her head swam with vertigo.
“Jessie,” she called out, her voice high-pitched with fear. “Jessie.”
Her sister glanced back at her. “Emma, what are you doing? Just stand up and come on.”
But Emma could not stand. She crawled along on all fours instead, her fingers clinging to the concrete surface of the dam even as her mind held tight to the image of the river below and would not let it go. She was trapped. God, how she longed to be off that dam, to be down, and yet turning back on her own was inconceivable.
“Jessie,” she tried again. But her voice was barely a whisper, and by now her sister was twenty feet ahead. The group had clustered there, the girls clinging to each other, giggling. Suddenly, as Emma watched, someone tore himself from the group and flung himself off the edge. Emma listened to him scream as he fell, her stomach in knots and her eyes clenched tight. His scream seemed to go on and on, until at last she heard a distant splash. There was a moment’s silence, and then a whoop, and then the nervous, tittering laughter of the girls.
Emma did not rise from her knees to look, but instead lowered her body fully, so that she was now lying belly down on the dam, her cheek against the concrete, her eyes closed.
One by one, they jumped, and screamed, and laughed, until it was just Emma and her sister left up on the dam, alone with the young man in the red trunks. He was encouraging; Jessie was hesitant. He was solicitous; her sister was coy.
Just jump if you’re going to jump, Emma thought bitterly. She didn’t believe her sister could be scared; Jessie was never scared. More likely she was enjoying having his full attention, now that the bikini-clad girls had all jumped off the side of the dam like lemmings.
“Come on down, Emma,” Candy yelled up, treading water in the lake below. “The water’s great.” But Emma would not budge.
“You don’t have to jump, you know,” Candy yelled, the annoyance back in her voice. “Just walk down the way we went up.”
But Emma couldn’t. She was paralyzed. “Somebody help,” she whispered, knowing no one would hear her. Her sister was yards away, only occasionally glancing back to where Emma lay. “Please help.”
Emma wanted to cry but couldn’t let herself; her whole body was clenched against disaster.
At last, Candy gave up and swam to the beach, then trudged again up the hill. She strode along the dam toward Emma as if it were any sidewalk in the world. Emma had no choice; she let Candy coax her back to all fours. Then ever so carefully, ever so slowly, while Candy dripped impatiently onto the hot concrete of the dam, she turned her body around.
Emma crawled all the way back to the end of the dam like a cat, leaving her sister alone with the young man. She lost sight of her as she and Candy skidded down the dusty hillside, but when she reached the little beach and looked up, they were still there.
Emma walked out into the lake until the water touched her chin. A few yards from her, the other swimmers were getting impatient.
“Come on, Adam,” someone called up. “She’s not going to do it. Just jump. She can walk down like the other one.”
But Emma knew her sister. Jessie would jump. Emma watched as she took a step back, gathering her momentum. And then there she was, launched into the air, her blue bathing suit falling, her tan limbs flailing, until she disappeared with a splash beneath the shimmering surface of the water.
I am alone, Emma thought. An emptiness shot threw her, so piercing that she ducked her head under the water to hide her tears. When she came up, there was Jessie in the lake, her eyes wild, laughing. Emma raised her arm to catch her sister’s eye, but Jessie did not turn toward Emma or the little beach. She took a few quick strokes toward the dam.
“Adam,” she yelled, gasping. “Adam, I did it!”
Emma took a deep breath and let herself sink beneath the surface of the water. When she came up at last, Jessie was swimming toward her, grinning, but Emma found that she could not meet her eye.