The Fall, the Water, the Weight

The Fall, the Water, the Weight

by Lina Rather

This is a sample from Augur Magazine Issue 1.2. The full story can be read by purchasing the issue here.

When Oliver calls me at three in the morning, I know it’s him before I even open my eyes. There’s no one else in the world who’d be on the phone at this time of night.

His voice is raspy when I pick up. “Charlotte. Julia’s missing.”

I don’t know what to say for a long moment. I slip out of bed and pad to the kitchen to avoid waking the cat, lean against the counter. “What do you mean? Where?”

“They found her car parked off on the side of Fulsom Road last night.” He pauses, sucks in air. In the background there’s a wooshing noise like traffic. Maybe he’s out there now. Fulsom’s not far from the highway. We used to park on the shoulder sometimes, back when we were kids, to avoid paying the fee to get into the state park. “Her mom called me a couple hours ago.” Another pause. This one stretches so long that I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not sleepwalking again. When he speaks, he’s whispering. “They found her shoes by the waterfall.”

In the morning, I get on a plane.

•••

There used to be four of us. Me, Anna, Julia, Oliver. We’d been friends since elementary school. The thing with the waterfall started the summer before sophomore year of high school, when Julia got her driver’s license.  That was back when only Oliver knew he was a boy, though he’d cut his hair short at the beginning of the summer in a particularly unflattering bowl cut. Anna was already dying, though she didn’t know it yet.

Julia was drunk with power, being the first of us to have both a license and a car. Every other day she showed up at my house with Oliver and Anna already in the backseat and we’d trek somewhere new. In August, we always went to the state park, because you could swim in the waterfall if none of the rangers were out.

In 1973, they put our waterfall on the cover of a state guidebook, it was that beautiful. A blue-green river running clear and true down a ten-foot drop. Trouble was the swimming hole at the end was too dark to see the bottom and it went thirty feet deep in some places. A sign nailed to a dying pine shouted SWIM AT OWN RISK. Someone died there every couple of summers because they cracked their head on the rocks and slipped under or because they underestimated just how long a swim it was across. The rangers would yell at you if they saw you diving, but the fall was far enough into the park that they rarely made the walk.

“You know what they say about this place,” Julia said one afternoon, floating on her back in the water in her shorts and a bikini top. She opened one eye and grinned at us. She had six months on me, Oliver, and Anna and she knew it. She was always the one telling spooky stories at sleepovers and orchestrating plans to sneak into R-rated movies. She stretched her toes, wiggling them in the sun. “They say it’s a portal.”

Anna rolled her eyes, but she paddled over and kissed Julia on the cheek, her silver charm bracelet glittering underwater. They were a package deal, those two. Ever since middle school. Who knows what would have happened if we’d all grown up, but for those years they were in love. “You’re full of shit.”

“It’s true!” Julia sent an arc of water towards Anna. It hit both her and me, but neither of us splashed Julia back. We knew when she was in a storytelling mood. “My great-grandmother told me. People used to see lights here. Will-o’-the-wisps.”

“Will-o’-the-wisps come from England,” Oliver interjected. He was lounging on the shore with a book.

Julia pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “Maybe they arrived on the Mayflower. But anyway, my grandma told me that people used to disappear here. Ever since the town started. And in the Great Depression babies got left here, if their families couldn’t feed them. Because their parents figured the fairies will take them. So they just gave their kids to the will-o’-the-wisps.”

Anna laughed. I said, “So the parents let them starve, and told themselves they’d gone to live with the wee folk?”

“Maybe their little bones are here,” Oliver said and made a fake shocked face. “Maybe you’re swimming over them.”

“You’re all so morbid,” Julia said. “It’s just a story.”

And it was, then. Not so much later.

•••

Oliver picks me up at the airport. He’s haggard, with circles under his eyes and his dark hair looks like he brushed it without a mirror. Or a brush. He braces himself on the steering wheel. “How was that fair you went to?”

“Made some money.” I’m an artist by trade. I tell people I’m a sculptor, but really it’s more garden ornaments and décor for children’s rooms than high art.  Birdbaths with fairies perched on the edge, mobiles of wire-wrapped butterflies, teapots with frogs inside. The sort of thing that sells well enough at art fairs and church sales. Empty-nester moms love their stupid-expensive lawn ornaments.

“Good,” he says, nods. He scratches at his goatee. It’s an old nervous habit. Before he had the beard he used to scratch at his wrists. The morning of the SAT he had red marks all up his forearms.

“Did you try calling her?” I ask.

“Of course I tried calling her. Everybody’s tried fucking calling her. You think her mom would have called me if she’d answered her phone?” He sighs. “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

After what happened with Anna, we scattered. Oliver went to college way out East. I got a full ride to a state school in Ohio then moved out to Oregon where I figured the art scene was better. Julia vanished for a while, reappearing every year or so to give us a call before falling off the map again. I kept up with her publications, but they never appeared in the same place twice. Last I heard, she was living in Georgia, but that was eighteen months ago. Oliver and I were probably the last of her friends that her mom had a phone number for. Or whose names she knew.

Oliver comes to a stop sign and lingers. Left is town, where we can go say our hellos to Julia’s mom and let others do the searching. Right is the state park. I point right. “You know where we have to go.”

•••

We found out Anna was dying in the fall of sophomore year, right before school started. Cancer. Later it came out that the factory in the next town upriver, the one that was surrounded by razor wire and that had been shut down since we were toddlers, had pumped heavy metals into the drinking water for years. It had produced the beepers for supermarket self-checkouts, and apparently that takes a lot of lead. Talk around town was that the government was supposed to designate a Superfund site, but no one in a hazmat suit ever showed. Maybe that was the cause, or maybe it was just dumb luck.

She did chemo, radiation, the whole nine yards. Her hair fell out and they put a port in her chest. She started smelling like rubber gloves and hand sanitizer. By Christmas they were talking about transplants, homeschooling, experimental therapies.

It wasn’t an inspirational tragedy and it wasn’t beautiful. It was just fucking terrifying.

Her parents still let us over because the doctors said we’d spent enough time together that we probably had the same germs. And Julia would have beaten down the door if they hadn’t. I think by that point Anna’s parents realized the two of them were dating, but they still let Julia sleep over. I don’t think they ever talked about it though, Anna and her parents. Back then we all thought we’d rather die than come out to our families, but if it had really come down to it? I don’t know. Now that I’m older it seems a shame to die with your family only knowing half the truth of you, but it would hardly be Anna’s fault if she did. It was so easy to imagine disaster. I didn’t tell my parents until I got a girlfriend the year after college, and they still blamed it on the influence of liberal higher education until I was twenty-five.

We’d sit in the basement with a space heater on and watch movies. Or tool around in the car, not stopping anywhere in case Anna picked something up from a stranger.

By Easter, they were talking about last tries.

Anna asked us over at the end of April. Her father answered the door because her mother was in the kitchen, pretending she wasn’t crying.

Anna was in the basement. All the lights were off, so the blue glow from the TV made the angles in her face look like a skull. All the bones in her head stuck out through her skin. She had papers all around her. Books. Old newspapers. Print-outs. I picked up a particularly ornate hardback, with its title done in copper gilt. Myths of the American Midwest.

Anna laid her head in Julia’s lap. Oliver perched on the edge of the couch, chewing the edge of his thumbnail. I had a feeling in my stomach like I’d eaten something bad.

“I need your help,” Anna said. She stared up at us. Her eyes were huge in proportion to the rest of her now. “You’ll help me, won’t you?”

Continued in Augur Magazine Issue 1.2 . . .

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LINA RATHER is a speculative fiction writer living in Washington, D.C. When she isn’t writing, she likes to cook, go hiking, and collect terrible 90’s comic books. Her work has appeared in  Shimmer, Flash Fiction Online, and Lightspeed, among others. You can find her on her website, linarather.wordpress.com or on Twitter.