A pause. “If you come with me, it could be easier.”

  “I can’t,” she murmured, and fought down that needle point of temptation, swallowed it away.

  “Then odds are,” the monster of the Bridge whispered, “that someday you will become something worse than I. Monsters are made, angry girl. They aren’t born. I was like you once. My anger imprinted on the world, knit me into it once I passed from humanity and into something different.”

  Jules snorted. Her ankle ached, her wrist was agony, but she still managed to lift up her other hand and shoot her middle finger at the darkened, whispering pines. “Then see you in a few decades, I guess.”

  No response. Slowly, the hum in the air quieted, until the night became nothing but chill and fog and night sky.

  She turned and started trudging up the road.

  Ghost on the Shore

  by Allison Saft

  IT‘S A HOT NIGHT. I’M SITTING IN MY CAR, A CAMRY FIXING TO TAKE its last gasping breath any day now. It’s my fault, I know. The tire pressure light is on, as it has been for weeks. The air conditioner died some forty miles outside Austin. And I never got the oil change I was supposed to before taking this road trip somebody might have talked me out of had I told anybody I was doing it. The thing is, I can’t bring myself to worry about any of it. I’m not particularly attached to living these days.

  Life is too fragile to get attached to. One day you’re there, and the next, you’re not. Summers here have a way of teaching you that. In summer, everything always teeters on that knife’s edge of living and dying. There are the wildflowers opening up to an unforgiving sun. There are flies swarming a roadkill armadillo. There are the worms baked onto the sidewalk the morning after the season’s only rain. And then there’s me, parked in front of Iris Lake, where the dead stumble up from its depths. In Texas, it’s one of those things you just know, the same as you know bluebonnets bloom in March and the moon pulls the tides. I don’t remember the first time I heard the story: whether it was from my grandmother or a girl at recess or a babysitter. We all know that in some places, the dead don’t stay dead.

  A thick fog rolls in and paints my windshield a milky gray. Iris Lake stretches out before me like a dark handprint pressed into the earth. The water is a solid, ruthless black tonight. On its surface, the reflection of the trees crowd in toward the center of the lake with hungry, reaching fingers. Cold moonlight cuts across it like a vein of silver. The clock on my dashboard blinks 2:00 a.m., the time when it happens. My heart somersaults in my chest, and something like hope catches in my throat. I feel completely stupid for it. Sometimes I think maybe I really have lost it like everyone says I have. Only someone crazy would drive four hours just to sit by a lake in the middle of the night. Only someone crazy would hope to see the dead.

  I fold myself up tighter in the driver’s seat and watch moonlight ripple on the lake. I wait with my shallow breath going stale in my lungs. The air feels heavy with some kind of magic and my own heady anticipation. But as the minutes tick by, the tentative hope that sparked within me dies to ashes, and the reality I’ve tried so hard to deny slips back in.

  June is gone.

  Rationally, I know this. But I let myself get swept away by a silly story I was desperate enough to believe. I rest my forehead against my knees and take one breath, then another, until it feels less like my head is swimming. I concentrate on the feeling of sweat sliding beneath my collar, the scratch of linen against my skin. I inhale the scents of decaying reeds and wet earth. And I search for the high, pulsing drone of the crickets—only because they’ve abruptly stopped singing. Only the hum of my engine cuts up the night’s uneasy silence. I lift my head, straining to listen to the night-sounds of the lake.

  Something slams into the passenger-side window.

  I startle so badly, I knock my knees into the steering wheel. “Jesus Christ.”

  But when I turn to look out the window, no one and nothing is there. There’s only the shape of a handprint in the condensation caked on the window. Water trickles down the glass like the slow bleed of a wound. It looks somehow obscene in its impossibility, like a tear in the world I want to stitch shut. I touch my own hand to it, and when I smear the fog away, there’s a dark shape, blurrily outlined.

  Although I can’t see their face clearly, I can feel their eyes boring into me with an intensity that makes the back of my neck prickle. Some part of me knows I should throw the car in reverse and drive. But that part of me has lain quiet for a long time. I roll down the window, and what I see hurts like a knife shoved between my ribs.

  June.

  She’s wearing a white sundress that’s dripping from the hem and plastered to her like a second skin. Beneath it, the straps of her swimsuit are a lurid purple against her collarbone. She’s always been pale white, but she seems to glow now. There’s something insubstantial about her, like all of her edges have been smudged with a careless hand.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you.” June’s voice is like the pull of the lake against the shore. The sound fills me with an animal terror. “Could I get a ride please?”

  Drive. The thought steals into my mind. There’s something wrong with the girl standing at the passenger-side window, and everything in me rears back from her. My fingers tighten around the gear shift. But no matter how she sounds, no matter how she looks, it’s still her. And if I leave now, I will never get to say my piece. That’s a pain I already know, and it’s far worse than the vague dread I feel right now.

  “Yeah.” By some miracle, my voice doesn’t waver. “Get in.”

  June smiles softly. It’s so polite, it’s almost cold. In her horrible, crocodilian voice, she says, “Thank you.”

  I don’t want her to speak ever again. I want her to talk to me for hours. My heart hammers in my throat as she opens the back door and climbs in as though moving through water. She doesn’t buckle herself in, only sits there with her shoulders hunched forward and her hair hanging around her face in limp, knotted strands. It’s caked in mud, like she’s been dredged from the silt at the bottom of the lake. The smell of lake water is overpowering, briny and tinged with something sickly sweet like rot. I almost gag at the stench of it, but I swallow down my horror.

  For her, I can do this.

  My mouth opens and closes, but no sound comes out. For a year, all I could think about was what I’d give to see her one more time. All the things I never got to say. I was such a coward back when she was alive. Maybe I’m still a coward now, if I can’t tell her even in death.

  June doesn’t seem to mind my silence. Like I’m a stranger to her or a rideshare driver, she says, “Could you drop me at 1227 Magnolia?”

  “Sure,” I rasp. “No problem.”

  It takes me way longer than it should to plug the address into my phone because I’m shaking so hard, I can barely type. Because I can feel her eyes like a blade on the back of my skull. The pin finally appears on the map, just about twenty minutes away. Somehow I manage to pull myself together enough to back the car onto the road. The darkness is so heavy, it falls over us like a curtain, and there are no streetlights to push it back. I take it slow around the bends, my hands white-knuckled around the wheel. The radio cuts in and out as a Top 40 station determinedly crackles through the static. Still, all I really hear is the steady pattering of June’s wet hair on the seats. All I hear is her breath hissing and lurching through her chattering teeth.

  We continue on that way for a few horrible minutes. Her hair drips, the static roars, and the longer she stares at me, the more I want to crawl out of my skin. The knob of my spine she’s fixated on feels alive, seething with insects I know aren’t there. I almost ask if she’s okay, but it feels like an insensitive question. There are so many other things I want to ask anyway. So many things I want to say. But I start with something safe. “I’ve really missed you, you know.”

  She says nothing. It’s almost unbearable to have vulnerability met with silence. I can’t remember the last time I even tried.

  “Okay.” It comes out entirely more pathetic than I meant it to. “We don’t have to talk, I guess.”

  June’s breath comes in deepening, throatier gasps, as though she can’t get enough air. Finally I dare to look back at her in the rearview. She’s clutching her arms and rocking gently back and forth, shivers racking her body.

  “Maud?” She sounds far away, underwater.

  “What is it?” I say, too quickly.

  “Please.” For the first time since she appeared, she meets my eyes. I expect the steady blue of the San Marcos River. But they’re a solid, lightless black, like the depths of the lake we left behind. They fill me up with cold. “Help me.”

  “Help you?” I choke out. “What?”

  Water runs down her face and dribbles down her lips. Her eyes grow rounder, panicked.

  Help me help me help me help me

  The plea sounds as though it’s inside my skull, horrible and shrill like metal grinding against metal. The rational part of me says, Stop the car. But I can’t pull myself away from her stare. I don’t feel entirely in control of myself as I press harder on the gas pedal. The engine revs. The condensation on my windshield thickens and streams down the glass in rivulets. I fumble with the wipers just as a muffled voice cuts through the radio’s static. I mash the off button, but I still hear it like a drone in my head.

  “What can I do? What else can I do?” I’m nearly shouting now as I meet her eyes in the rearview. “I can’t drive any faster. I don’t know what you want.”

  I realize too late that I’ve swerved out of the lane. A car horn blares. Headlights flood through the windshield. Instinct kicks in, and I sharply pull off the road, slamming on the brakes just before we crash into the guardrail. The other driver leans on the horn as they speed by.

  “Fuck,” I whisper, pressing my forehead to the steering wheel.

  I’m glad that I can’t see their expression. I’m even more glad that they can’t see mine. I’m shivering, I realize, so hard that I feel like I’m going to rattle out of my skin. Sweat beads on my temples, and my heart beats a vicious thud-thud in every pulse point of my body. In the mirror, I look like a wreck. My lips are ghostly pale, my eyes wide and bloodshot. But over my shoulder, I see something much worse. My back seat is empty.

  June is gone again.

  It’s very possible I’ve lost it.

  I’m not thinking very clearly, I’m exhausted after the drive, and—as everyone is so fond of reminding me—grief does strange things to us. If I have to hear that one more time, I think I’ll scream. I’m not discounting the possibility that I imagined everything. But the thing is, the back seat of my car is still soaked through. It still smells like lake water.

  The earthiness of it once made me think of happier times: carefree summers floating in the river or rowing out to the center of Lady Bird Lake. June and I would lie flat on our backs, staring up at the pitiless sky, trading sips of the beer she’d convinced her older sister to buy for us. I wonder what about those dreamy afternoons—about me—lost its appeal for her. Why wasn’t I enough to keep her from going to Iris Lake? Why hadn’t I gone with her? Now, as I breathe in the stench of the water, I can only think of June’s eyes when I met them in the mirror.

  Bottomless. Horrible.

  I don’t want to think about it anymore, but I can’t stop turning over last night when none of it makes sense. Legend has it that anyone who dies in Iris Lake’s waters is kept sleeping beneath the surface. Every morning at two, the souls of the dead wash up on the shore and wait for someone to take them home. But June lived in Austin, not here. Why would she ask me to take her somewhere twenty minutes away from the lake?

  I rub my eyes and take another sip of the coffee I’m nursing. This morning, I holed up in a coffee shop called the Peachtree Café. It’s a charming spot, named, I assume, for the peaches that grow in the area. They’ve got all sorts of themed items on the laminated menu: peach cobblers, peach pies, peach muffins, peach salsa for the lunchtime crowd. Plants are crammed into every possible corner, on every possible surface, and even hang from the rafters. I’ve got a muffin on my plate torn half to shreds, which I almost feel guilty about. But I don’t remember the last time I’ve really thought about food enough to be hungry.

  Maybe this is finally rock bottom: a coffee shop in Nowhere, Texas. But every time I think that, I keep falling and falling into a lightless place like June’s eyes. If there is a bottom to the way I feel, I don’t intend to ever find it.

  It’s earlier than most people are awake, but it’s already hot, with sunlight spilling over the tiled floor. I really should be asleep, but after dropping off June, I felt like a live wire.

  Alive.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve felt alive or like myself, assuming there’s anything left of myself after June took part of me with her to the grave. At school, I’m not really Maud anymore. I’m the dead girl’s friend. I’m “troubled.” I don’t blame them for what they say about me. I did smash the windshield of Tanner Bolton’s truck the day after June’s funeral. I recognize now that it might’ve been extreme, but here’s how it is. One day, June tells me she’s going to Tanner’s lake house over spring break. Another, her mom calls me up and says that she’s gone.

  Drowned. Her voice was so garbled, I thought maybe I was the one underwater. A horrible accident.

  It isn’t fair. It isn’t fucking fair that Tanner Bolton draws breath and June none at all. So I smashed his window. It was worth every disappointed look my parents gave me.

  “Can I get you anything else?”

  “Huh?”

  “Anything else you need?” The girl standing at my elbow carries a pot of coffee and, apparently, the entire weight of the world on her shoulders. She exudes the smell of cigarette smoke and a practiced aura of ennui. She’s distractingly pretty, even though she’s looking at me like I’m a sad little insect. Her brown hair is tied back in a sleek pony tail, and her skin is the color of sandstone. “Something else to shred? Some paper, maybe?”

  As I blink the sun out of my eyes, I see that she’s my age. The name tag on her apron says, Need anything? I’m happy to provide you service excellence! My name is Carolina. Between her unimpressed glare and the all-black getup beneath her apron, I kind of doubt she’d be happy to do much of anything. I curl myself around my mug and mutter, “Sorry. Thanks. I’m good for now.”

  “Right. So, what brings you to town?”

  “I heard the food was good.”

  She stares down at my full cup and ritualistically disassembled muffin. “I see we’ve disappointed.”

  “No, I’m just…” I sigh. I feel like I owe her something now, so I tell her the truth. “I’m here to see Iris Lake.”

  Her spine straightens. “Oh yeah? Well, no good comes from that lake.”

  “I know it. It took my friend.”

  I don’t know why I say it. Lately I don’t know why I do or say half the things I do. There’s something vindicating about the shock on people’s faces. I like to see how they try to recover the conversation. I like to see them squirm.

  Carolina doesn’t even blink. “It won’t give them back, either.”

  It already has, I want to say, but I’m ready for this conversation to be over. I bite my tongue and shrug instead.

  Carolina has no interest in sparing me, however. She glances over her shoulder and surveys the empty café. The old-timey jukebox crackles merrily in the corner, but now that I’m listening, I can make out the steady drip, drop, drip of water. I can’t figure out where it’s coming from. How had I not noticed it before? Every drop sounds as loud as gunfire.

  Carolina sets down the pot of coffee and slides into the seat across from me. I don’t like the look she’s giving me. I see it all the time on my therapist. And before they stopped talking to me, I saw it on my friends when they told me I needed to get my life together and “do the bare minimum.” It’s a look that expects something from you. But I don’t have anything left to give.

  “I’m going to give you some advice. No extra charge.” There is no room for argument in her tone. “What’s your name?”

  “Maud.”

  “Okay, Maud.” It’s a surprisingly nice sound, my name on her lips. She has the barest hint of a West Texas accent. “I get it. All of us have to see Iris Lake for ourselves at least once. But what you saw … It may look like your friend, but it’s not.”

  I can’t describe the feeling that slithers through me then. It’s something like rage and something like relief. I feel out of control, and it’s made worse by that awful sound. The drip, drop, drip of some pipe I can’t see. I look up. Carolina follows my gaze to the ceiling.

  “If it’s not her, then what is it?” I know I sound cruel when I say it.

  “The Lady of the Lake.” There are no theatrics in her voice, no campfire flair.

  “The Lady of the Lake,” I repeat incredulously.

  Carolina catches herself just before she rolls her eyes. It reminds me so much of June that it almost takes the breath out of me. “Laugh all you want. All I know is that it’s best to get in your car and drive back to wherever you came from. All right?”

  Drip, drop, drip. Each droplet seems to shatter inside my skull. “There’s nothing for me back where I came from.”

  “No,” she says sharply. “No, see, that’s not an answer. Come up with a better one. You have to find something. And in the meantime, if you see it again, you have to tell it to go.”

  It. I bristle. “What the hell do you know anyway?”

  “A lot. You can go through life like this, or you can make an effort to move on.” She gestures to her uniform. “Do you think I want to be here? It keeps me busy, and it keeps me out of the house.”

  The way she says house, like it’s more of an entity than a place, speaks to me. But I can’t let up until I make Carolina understand. I have to talk to June. I have to tell her what I couldn’t tell her in life—what I couldn’t tell anyone. “This is moving on. I’m trying to say goodbye to her. And last night, she … She’s trying to get me to take her somewhere. She’s trying to tell me something. I know it, and if I can just figure out what it is—”

 

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