“My girl,” he said, and swept me up. My small foot lifted from the floor, weightless in the air as my father spun me round, round, round.
Father and I were sitting on the back porch when I saw the lights on the island.
We each rocked in a rocking chair, wood planks below us making a kind of music. To and fro, back and forth, neither one of us could sit still. Laura was with us, but she sat near the porch railing, legs dangling into open air, silent all this time. While Father and I tried to fill the four-year gap we each carried, Laura looked across the dark lawn, toward the lake.
Its surface was black glass, reflecting every now and then a light from the houses on the opposite shore. But tonight, there was another light, a light that could come only from the island.
“Laura, what is that?” I asked.
But she had not noticed the light and didn’t until I pointed it out to her. The light didn’t look like any of the house lights or their reflections. It was golden and flickering. There was no breeze, so I imagined the flicker came each time someone crossed in front of it.
“Don’t go out there,” Father said, and blew a stream of pipe smoke into the night air.
The smoke plumed pale against the night, growing ever thinner until it was gone. I squinted across the lake, as if I might be able to see whoever was out there, but saw only a ripple on the glass lake, a moment’s disturbance in the reflected lights. Don’t go out there, I thought, but it was the one place I suddenly wanted to go. The expression on Laura’s face said the same. What were those lights? Who was out there? We both wanted to know.
Cousin Winnie couldn’t abide the idea of swimming in the lake. When she learned there were fish, she was doubly repulsed.
“All those fishy mouths. This is as close as I can get,” she said and sat down in the middle of the dock.
I could only get a little closer, sticking my bare feet in. It wasn’t that the fish bothered me; I wouldn’t have minded their fishy mouths nibbling at me. It was that I could not swim, not with my withered leg.
While Laura floated in the water up to her nose, with her hair fanning around her like seaweed, Winnie and I sat on the dock and made up stories about the island fire.
Winnie talked of young men, long limbs browned by the sun, hair glistening with lake water. She dreamed of their sodden swim trunks in colors we could not yet put a name to, and strong legs pushing off from the muddy island shore. She envisioned toe prints in the mud, not ten but twelve, each one webbed.
I dreamed up women — Dellaphina, Allegra, Mirabel — and clothed them in gossamer, spiderweb, water lily. Allegra wore her hair long and dark, and the spiders huddled there, frightened of the sunlight. But when she dove into the lake, the spiders bubbled up and swam for the lilies. They climbed, though the reeds were slippery, and found new homes deep inside the water blossoms. Dellaphina was the color of fire, her skin and her hair molten gold, for she was the light we had seen from shore, and how she danced! It was Mirabel’s first time to the island; she watched everyone and everything with wide eyes the color of fir trees.
“You’re both absurd,” Laura said, and turned lazy circles in the water before us. “It’s only ghosts. Japanese ghosts from the war. Come to haunt Father and keep him awake all night.”
Father had stayed awake late into the night; I listened to him pace on the back porch and smelled the tang of his pipe smoke. I shivered at Laura’s words, even though it was only pretend. She wanted him to tell her about the war, about killing, but he refused.
Laura asked, but I only hedged. What was it like, Father? was all I managed. He would scoop me up and laugh, because how could he tell any one of us what it was like? Someday, he would try, he said he owed that to us, but today was too soon; Laura’s make-believe ghosts were too close.
Laura floundered in the water, making a great show of sinking. She thrashed and flung water on us.
“I’m caught, oh! The ghosts are carrying me away!” Winnie came to her knees, wide-eyed like Mirabel, and shrieked until my sister rose, a laughing Venus from the waters.
Winnie didn’t find anything remotely funny about Laura’s game and stalked up the hill. She stalked slowly, though, allowing me to keep pace with her. As it neared the house, the brown sugar-dirt path forked and Winnie took the right branch, walking instead toward the gardens where hardworking bees hummed as they flitted from flower to flower. Winnie walked the row between the blackberry bushes, every now and then ripping a curling tendril of vine loose.
“I’m glad he’s dead. Glad.”
Winnie flung her handful of vines at me and fled faster than I could have followed if I cared to. I watched her go and even from a distance heard her cry.
Every night, Father paced the back porch. I kneeled in bed and peered through the filmy curtains that covered the window. When I felt especially brave, I parted the curtains and looked beyond my father, to the lake and its island with the flickering gold light. Don’t go out there, Father had said. Ghosts, I thought, and dived back under the covers.
The night after, I looked out and saw, instead of Father, the tail of my sister’s pale nightgown whipping down the stairs and into darkness. I watched her run barefoot down the sloping lawn and vanish.
I sat on the edge of my bed and waited, watching, but Laura didn’t come back. The hands on the clock moved through half an hour, and still she did not come. At an hour, the sky outside was beginning to brighten. I changed my nightgown for blouse and skirt, shoes and cane, and quietly made my way out of the house.
The lawn was slippery with dew. I stuck to the path that led to the dock, wondering if Laura had found Winnie’s island of young men, or mine of dancing women. Had the ghosts carried her away?
“That’s silly,” I told myself.
Not even the sound of my voice was a comfort, though, and I walked a little faster. I pictured Laura floating in the lake, hair spreading around her, water lily vines curled around her neck. Pictured her face gone blue, her eyes as black as the hem of her gown, scorched from the island fire. I stumbled.
The ground seemed to tip out from under me. I landed in the dew-damp grass breathing hard, all the while looking for Laura. I was about to scream her name when I saw her, stretched some distance away in the grass.
Laura’s hair and nightgown were wet, as though she had been swimming. The gown clung to her like a second skin, her hair madly tousled. Laura stretched, spreading fingers and toes into the first light of day, and saw me. Laughed at me.
“Where have you been?” I asked, sputtering as though I were the one wet after a dunking in the lake.
Laura said nothing. She rolled to her feet and made for the house, leaving a soaking footprint on each of those thirteen steps up. There was no towel waiting for her.
I looked at the lake, a ring of shadow even as the sky brightened; it would be some time before the sunlight touched it. I watched, holding my breath as I waited.
When the fish broke the surface, I gripped my cane and pushed myself to stand. I headed for the dock. The fish were numerous now, gathering to snatch the bugs that hovered in the half-light before dawn. They glided like magical creatures, and I kneeled on the dock to watch them.
One slithered its way to the dock. I reached down to stroke its back, but when it turned from belly to back, it was not fish scales I stroked. It was warm skin.