His body had been heavy and it had taken every ounce of strength she could find in her tiny five-foot-two frame to pull him from the back of her mother’s fifteen year old station wagon, lower him to the ground without losing her grip on him and drag him into the water. He had been wearing a suit: a navy blue blazer, a dress shirt that was missing the third button down but was the same stale color of the gloomy sky. His favorite tie, the black one with the tiny white checkered squares on it, had loosened a bit around his neck and flapped in the wind, rising up and brushing her left cheek a few times. She had pulled him, both of her hands cupped underneath the arms of his dry cleaned sports coat and his balding head bobbed between her legs and smacked between her knees like a weightless balloon attached to a fat middle-aged stick, until he was in the water. It was there that she let him drop. There had been little splash or sound as he had slipped beneath the jade colored murky water. But his eyes had been open, gaping and staring up at her, wide and alert and permanently terrified. The knife – the one her mother had ordered off of television because the commercial boasted that it could cut through anything – was still inside his heart. The black handle, wooden with gleaming silver trim, stopped where it met his split, ripped skin. Within seconds he disappeared. And after years of his berating and his criticism and his nightly sermons on God, the apostles, the saints and the detrimental temptation of sins and lust, he was now resting quietly on the bottom of the lake like a botched baptism.

It had been so much easier than she had expected. She had waited for him in the garage after school, in the far left corner, near the water heater. It was a place she knew well, as she had come to know it as her hiding place. It was the one place that he could not get to her. She was
small enough to wedge her way into the tiny space between the wood paneled wall and the cylindrical heater. He was too big to get back there. Sure, he tried. But after a few futile attempts at shoving his fat arm back there, he would tire and give up. And she would wait there until her mother came home complaining about another long day at the office, demanding to know why nobody filled the dishwasher like she had asked.

Once she had finally decided to go through with it, the worst part had been the waiting. She had been anxious, longing for the act to take place. She would think about it, imagining every second of it, while she sat in the back of the classroom or while she laid awake in her room watching the digital red numbers on her alarm clock. She couldn’t wait to do it and the excitement of it all nearly drove her insane.

The deed was done, though. She stood on the lake’s edge, reflecting.

She hadn't been to the lake in five years. Not since she was twelve, freckled and sunburned and she had kissed George Bartlett at summer camp. The kiss had been nothing more than furtive, young lips smashed together but it had lingered, like a haunting, during episodes of nostalgic loneliness that had periodically ghosted around since then. The memory still tasted of strawberry lip gloss and caused her cheeks to pinken and the corners of her mouth to lift into a smile that caused anyone that met her to take pause and reexamine the undeniable innocent charm that she possessed. George Bartlett was long gone, though. He was now studying at Stanford and rumor had it that he was destined to become some kind of doctor – a brain specialist or something fancy like that. He always was a smart one, too smart for his own good. The camp counselors had referred to him as “Smart Ass Georgie”. She had been labeled “the good one” and told that she had “the face of an angel”.

Her eyes, small and wistful, skimmed the lake’s tranquil surface. She watched, first with a forced ease and then with a sudden sense of calm, as a brown bird with huge sweeping wings danced down from the sky and dipped the tip of his right wing into the water. Like an incision, the wing sliced the water, and lake water was spun into an arc of tiny drops like transparent blood. The bird seemed to effortlessly pirouette, like a music box ballerina or a synchronized swimmer, as it dragged its wing through the water for at least forty yards. Finally, the bird lifted away and the lake shimmered with tender ripples, like unspooled Christmas ribbon. The sweet and sharp breath of the hovering pine trees that encompassed the lake like a landscaped force field caused her to tremble with a slight shiver.

She shifted nervously from one foot to the other, trying to generate some type of heat as she stood in the foggy mist that the lake infused, as if it were a warning that was heard, but only whispered. She glanced down, just briefly, her attention diverted by the squishing sound that her once-white tennis shoes made. They were wet and worn from the rain drenched soil and the seventy-mile drive she had just completed, to get to this spot. But there was blood, too, and it took her a moment to actually see it – to accept the fact that it was even there. It was mixed with the near-black sludge and soaked into the tops of her shoes. The tips of her baby blue shoelaces were tinged a deep red. The rubber soles – the white sides of them - glistened with dirt, water and his blood. It was a jarring feeling for her, looking down at the blood, as something inside of her felt like it was suddenly yanked open. The complete realization of what she had just done, the irreversible act that she had just committed, all flooded into her mind like an avalanche of supreme consciousness. It was an awakening of sorts. Her breath quickened and she felt her pulse throb beneath her thin, white wrists. There was a tight, sharp feeling in the middle of her chest. Her fingertips, slowly numbing from the early wintry air, went to the spot where it hurt. She rubbed, almost absentmindedly, hoping the pinching, almost choking feeling would dissipate. The red cotton of her t-shirt felt oddly foreign to her as she moved her fingers over it, just below her breastbone. Her denim jacket suddenly seemed too large for her. The frayed edges of the cuffs, folded up once, reached down to the middle of her hands that were trembling just slightly. Her cut off shorts seemed to hang from her hips like paper. The shivering suddenly nearly overtook her as it became uncontrollable, so much so that her teeth chattered. Not only from the cold that whipped around her head and stung the back of her ears but also from the recovery from the surge of adrenaline that had poured through her like contagious giddiness.

She could smell the blood. The sharp pungent stench of raw iron floated up from her feet and into her nose and she coughed a little and tried to swallow the bitterness. The sharp pain in her chest clinched her again and she winced a little but she could feel her pulse slowing down a bit. It was caused by the onset of reality that was sinking in like the bottom of her shoes that were sinking at a rate of a quarter of an inch a minute into the milky mud.

Her gaze continued to bore into the ground as if she were waiting for something to appear. Just inches from the toes of her shoes, there were two deep indentions in the mud – four inches in width and of identical length and proportion. His ankles – his size twelve Nunn Bush loafers - had carved two tracks in the mud and they trailed all the way down to the edge of the water where they suddenly disappeared.

She looked up then, as the brown bird, in flight, called down to her with a squawk, as if beckoning or inviting her to join him on his journey. If only I could, she thought. Her reverie and her silent victory of the triumphant moments that had just passed was interrupted by the call of the bird and the soft lush of the water brushing over the lip of the shore – oh like George and that strawberry summer.

For a second, she could almost hear George Bartlett's voice, cracked and nervous and thirteen. "I like you a lot," he had muttered, as they had sat on the edge of the lake and the delicate brink of adulthood. "You're different from the other girls."

I am, she responded to his memory. I am different. I’m the good one. She closed her eyes, licking her lips as if George's kiss still lived there. And for a moment, as brief as it was, she felt like everything was going to be okay.

She knew she would have to get back into the station wagon that was parked behind her and warm up the car a few moments before turning the car heater on. She would listen to music, probably In The End by Linkin Park because it was her favorite song. She would throw the car into reverse and leave it all behind her: the pervert at the bottom of the lake and his brutality that she had endured for four years and twelve days. She would drive back to her hometown but on the way there, she would stop off at a self-serve car wash and soap down the inside and outside of the station wagon. Her mother would be so pleased to have a clean car waiting for her in the driveway at home when she got home from the office. There, she would casually remark on how strange it was that Daddy wasn’t home yet. She would even suggest that they call his office. She might even be the one to dial the phone. As the hours would tick by and her mother’s face would grow heavier with concern, she would be the source of comfort and finally, she would be the one to ultimately call the police to report him missing. The next day, she would go to school and she would welcome the questioning stares and return them with a hesitant glance of sorrow. And she would tell a teacher or two that the only thing she truly wanted for Christmas was for her father to be found and to come home safely.

And she would mail a letter to Stanford and she would suggest that George Bartlett come home for the holidays and it would be awesome if they spent New Year’s Eve together, just for old times’ sake. Over Martinis made from a stolen bottle of gin from her mother’s hidden stash in the garage, she would remind George of their first kiss and they would toast to their childhood at the stroke of midnight. She would make love to him and tell him how she had always dreamed of being a doctor’s wife.

In the years to come, she would only keep that memory of the lake in her mind, of the shared kiss with George. The rest she would forget because it would be necessary in order for her to survive.

The lake was beautiful. It was the last place in the world that she remembered being innocent.

As she climbed in to the station wagon, she pressed the play button on the tape deck and she wrapped her fingers around the cold steering wheel as years of rage subsided. As the music washed over her, she tried to figure out a way to get that feeling back again.