The lake is coming for my kid. In my heart, I once wrote, he opens the door to this vast terrain of fear. But now I know it’s a lake not a terrain, and that it’s my fear made manifest that’s coming for him. Sometimes I’m paralyzed by my love for him…. In the last few hours, between dream and dawn, like a thought cast adrift waiting for me to rescue it, I’ve come to know in no way I can explain that it doesn’t matter where we go, it doesn’t matter how far we try to get away, the lake will keep coming for him and that I can’t be paralyzed anymore. Down in the hole of the lake, down in the opening of the birth canal where the world broke its water, lurks my son’s doom and I must stop it. I have to shake myself loose of the love that holds me down, and find inside me the love that will save him. I have to go to war with the womb of the century that would reclaim him. Hand in hand, Kirk and I make our way downstairs to Valerie and Parker’s room and they’re gone, door standing open and crib hastily ransacked, the water only a few feet below their window.
Around noon the power goes out in the rest of the hotel. I know now that Kirk and I are the last light burning in the window for some other mom to see from some other window in the future. When the hotel manager’s deserted silver gondola washes up on the stairs just below our floor, I know it’s a sign.
In my heart my boy opens the floodgate to a vast sea of fear; but I must close that gate. I despise myself when I look at him at the other end of the gondola, without even a life jacket, precarious on the lake beneath us … I despise the danger I subject him to now, the danger I’ve given birth to that laps at our boat. His hair shines in the sun above, and I’m amazed to see him hold his toy monkey Kulk in its redspacesuit and space helmet. You found it, I say, and he just nods. Looking east I’m not certain anymore how far the lake goes, although in the distance I still see Wilshire office complexes. Nobody else is on the lake. But where did you find it? I say and Kirk says, Under my pillow. But I looked there, I say, I looked there a hundred times. The afternoon passes, we sail through the labyrinth of old Hollywood buildings that rise from the black water like the heads of granite fetuses the world has miscarried. Out in deeper water the black of the lake frames Kirk’s head, his bright light. Scraps of wood from the disintegrating Chateau X harbor drift by. Of course it seems my wildman has no fear at all. For a minute I reassure myself that from his three-year-old perspective this all seems impossibly cool. As we follow the hills around to the northeast, the lake is still shallow enough I can push us most of the way with the pole … I want to push the pole please, Kirk says. He starts to stand in the gondola to take the pole and I explode with terror: Sit down! I scream at him, and he starts to cry.
He cries, and as he cries his hands start to move, start to talk the language of hands he learned from Parker. For a while I just sit there at my end of the boat, then gingerly move to him, to pull him to me for a minute and hold him. The way his fingers keep talking in the air, the way he clutches me, I know he’s more afraid than I thought. Sorry wildman, I whisper in his ear over and over sorry and I almost turn the boat back to the peninsula … but I know what I know, and I must do what I must do.
La-la please, Mama his frightened whisper matching mine, conspiratorial in our fear.
If there’s a higher light let it shine on me
and by four-thirty we circle around the bend at Laurel Canyon and push our way up the watery ravine where we once watched city divers swim to the bottom of the lake
’cause I know this sea wants to carry me
and the sound of loons echoes around us in the growing fog even as the lake’s songs have gone silent. On the banks of the lake in the wind we can see flapping the tents from the abandoned fair where one afternoon we saw up close the owl that hears human heartbeats, and where another afternoon we saw and heard the melody-snakes from the lake’s source. By now the lake has taken most of the fairgrounds. In a long dark row the empty tents billow and collapse, black mouths blowing out over the water.
We reach the lake’s center. The hole at the bottom is somewhere right below us.
Listen to me wildman I say as calmly as possible, lowering myself over the side of the gondola into the water. He’s puzzled.
Mama in Big Agua? Yes, Mama’s going in the Big Agua for a minute. Just for a minute, do you understand?
He blinks at me in the twilight. Please don’t cry, it will break my heart. I’m already starting to shiver, and I don’t want him to see that. My teeth chatter, and I don’t want him to hear that….
Why?
So it can’t hurt you anymore
… don’t ask why …
do you understand?
… there isn’t time for your whys. He nods, like he’s actually figured it out.
Who’s the boss here, wildman. It’s a minute before he answers quietly
You are.
You have to sit here in the boat very still. Very, very still. You have to sit here and wait for me to come back, you can’t move at all or else you could fall in—
No Big Agua for me.
No, no Big Agua for you. So you sit very still, OK?
Yes.
And I ’ll be right back for you. OK?
Yes please.
I’ll be gone just a minute.
Silently he watches me. He doesn’t cry. He looks around us at the lake and at the sky above him in that preternatural way of his.
Night-time
he says.
I love you, Kirk.
Mama come back?
Right back.
He blinks.
Yes, please.
I look around me, and for a minute the chill of the water passes. My eyes drink in everything, they’re thirsty like they know something I don’t…. the twilight is the kind of blue you see maybe once in a lifetime, maybe once. In the wind I hear the murmur of the fluttering tents on the lakeshore, and I know I have only minutes before the sky fills with owls that can hear his heart and suddenly she can hear his heart herself, its steady thump in the murmur of the tents near the water. She reaches over and takes Kirk’s hand in her own and presses it, and before he can cry or try and grab her, she takes as deep a breath as she can, and down into the lake she slips.
He watches his mother disappear. Another presence whispers in his ear and instinctively his head turns, like an owl, to gaze at the shore, where he sees another young woman, not more than eighteen or nineteen years old, watching him. Kneeling at the lake’s edge, she’s like a sprite with long straight gold hair almost to her waist, and when she sees that he notices her, she raises her hand to wave. The little boy waves back.
Sinking, Kristin can still hear his heart. Looking up through the water one last time, she can see him leaning over the edge of the silver gondola peering down at her with his red monkey in hand, his head a shimmery sphere floating above the lake, like the parasols of autumn.
2009