Their father was gone and their mother was sick. She’d been sick before, in the mornings, mostly, with headaches that made her rage against the children as they left for school, leaving her crumpled against the doorway, a beautiful woman, even the children knew that, sobbing apologies as they trudged away.
It was just that she was so tired. “Tired of us?” the children asked. Yes. Tired of them and the house and the afternoon idleness; she had been an actress once; she had done important work; they had all seen her in her fitted gray suit and blonde wig and heard her voice in the Robert Redford movie (“Mr. Archer will see you now”); they had attended every night of her four night performance as Sabina in The Skin Of Our Teeth; they knew what she was capable of, even if her agent did not.
What she needed was rest. Their father‘s friend had a summer cabin on a southern lake, and the children and their mother could go there to rest. The oldest child could cook. The second child could clean. The third child could–well no one expected the third child to do much but stay out of the way. The fourth child, the only boy, could fish.
The cabin was cold when they arrived. Their mother went straight to the bed in the corner, pulled the covers over her face and fell asleep, though she woke up in the dark once calling for their father until the children reminded her that he was gone. The second child built a fire in the woodstove and the boy kept the third child quiet by letting her play with his pocketknife. The oldest girl opened all the bags of chips and cookies she’d been told to save. She was 12 and knew better but she opened the bag of chocolate bars too.
The children sat on the floor in front of the stove and ate thoughtfully. They had never been here before. They didn’t like it. The lake water slapped against the pier posts below the cabin and the air smelled like cold boiled eggs. There was a radio, but no television, and the only books on the narrow shelf were old with small print. The second child spread her art supplies out on the card table and began to draw a picture of their father on butcher paper to help them, she said, remember. The oldest girl put the two younger ones to bed, on sleeping bags on the floor, and told them a story about a talking owl who gave everyone exactly what they wanted. “What if what you want is to shoot that owl,” the brother said, his voice choked with his own cleverness. “Then you get to,” the oldest girl said. “But you’ll lose all the wishes!” the third girl protested. “Rough world,” the second girl called, repeating something they had heard their father say, and then they were all quiet because they longed for their father to come back with his big voice and roar their mother awake.
In the morning their mother told them to go down to the lake but to stay out of the water until she could watch them; they waited but she never came, though later that day when they were squatting under the pier slapping at gnats they heard her laughing with the friend of their father’s, who had dropped by, he told them, to make sure they were all right. He had brought a bottle of scotch and a bag of ice, and the ice and grown up voices made familiar sounds in the afternoon heat. Their mother, in a white bathing suit and sunglasses, appeared with the man on the rickety porch and said the children could swim now. Dutifully the children swam, out to the buoy and back, out and back. The lake water was warm and cement colored and scummy; things floated in it, scraps of toilet paper, sea gull feathers, dead bees, small islands of phlegm. When they were tired of swimming the two youngest girls dug holes in the dirt; the oldest girl was lost to them, deep in a book she had found, about an entire family murdered in a farm house; when she looked up from the book the world looked different. It was as if a sheet of sheer yellow foil had been dropped over everything, hot and glistening, unreal. She saw her brother at the end of the pier threading worms through a hook. The two younger girls had dropped their shovels and gone to him; she went too. The worms were repulsive, fat damp noodles with throbbing pink circlets and baby-finger ends. When the hook went through them their insides foamed out, yellow as the afternoon’s eerie light; the worms writhed and twisted on the hook. “They are in pain,” the youngest girl breathed.
“Not for long,” the brother muttered confidently and he cast into the clouded water. The children watched as a swift shadow below moved in and moved out, too fast for the brother to snag, and when he did reel in the hook was empty. “Let me,” the second girl asked, and she picked a worm from its white carton and threaded it as her brother instructed, all the while thrilled by the plump burst of guts. This time the brother did reel a fish in. His sisters watched it thumping and thudding on the planks. They shivered with joy and regret when their brother banged its head in with a rock. “Dead,” he said with satisfaction.
“Dead,” the children repeated. Death had not occurred to them before, but once it did occur the thought did not leave them, and all the rest of that day, piercing worm after worm, they considered it. “Not for a long long time,” the second child decided; “Not ever,” the third child chimed in; “Just let ‘em try,” the boy said. But the oldest girl was silent. Later, out on the boat with their father’s friend, she knew for the first time she could drown, and that night, looking into the glowing stove, she saw for the first time she could burn, and the next morning, waking early to reach for her book, she saw for the first time that she could be murdered, and felt, watching her father’s friend slip from her mother’s bed and out the front door, where the sun was already gilding the lake, as if she had already started to die.
