Lost Girls

  Lost Girls

  Andrew Pyper

  For Leah

  Terrible experiences pose the riddle whether the person who has them is not terrible.

  —Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  PART TWO

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  THE TRADE MISSION

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  An afternoon following a day so perfect that people can speak of nothing but how perfect a day it has been. At least these people, sitting in canvas folding chairs on the small cleared beach of a lake in a country where summer is only a brief intermission of winter, watching the sun begin its setting with reverence and sunburned fatigue, making music with the ice in their drinks and feeling that this—ownership of a good place near water and trees and out of sight of neighbors—is more true and real than anything else they could hope for their lives. One of the men rises to tend to the barbecue and the air is filled with the promise of lighting fluid and burning fat. It is not yet dusk but mosquitoes rise from the unmowed grass and drift up into the willow limbs as bats burst out from under the cottage eaves to swallow them. More drinks, more ice—clinkety-clink—the rising gush and sweep of a woman’s laughter at one of the men’s mumbled stories. A feathery lick of wind swirls among them, through their legs, cooling the sweat at their necks. Before them the lake flashes with reflected light but steadily darkens just below the surface, turning the afternoon’s clear blue to a purple coagulation of silt and water and weeds—the color of frostbitten lips, of blood left to dry on the blade.

  First a girl and then a boy come out through the cottage’s screen door and the people by the lake turn to wave lazily up at them, having almost forgotten that they are here as well. The two stand together in bare feet and tans, whispering, the boy telling the girl things about their parents that make her throw her hand to her mouth. He is in his early teens and she a half-year younger, but they have known each other and days like this before, time spent behind the backs and under the dining room tables of the grown-ups. Everyone is pleased that the two cousins get along so well and take care of each other so that the adults can imagine themselves, for the time they’re all up here, as young and untroubled and childless.

  As the man at the barbecue lays the slabs of meat upon the grill, the boy and girl walk down to where the others are sitting and ask if they can take the canoe out for a while before dinner. There’s no disagreement from the parents, although one of the women makes a joke about how “cute” it is that the two of them have such a “crush” on each other, and this starts a mocking whoop from the man who isn’t tending the barbecue. They’ve all been through this routine before. The boy and girl know that this is what their parents like best: drinking a little too much and making remarks about experiences that have passed to a comfortable enough distance that they can now make fun of them, dismiss them even, like first love. So in response they say nothing directly, although the girl mouths ha ha ha at her mother to note that the joke stopped being funny a long time ago.

  They pull the aluminum canoe out from under the dense scrub of sweet gale and leather-leaf which marks the end of the property and, sharing a look, throw the life jackets back under. Slide the hull down to the beach and over the narrow stretch of pebbly sand which screeches against the metal. The girl is at the front and the boy at the back (or bow and stern, as the boy’s father keeps telling him). This is their usual arrangement. The boy is strong and has a practiced J-stroke, which comes in handy when the girl gets tired and he has to bring them in on his own.

  “Kissin’ cuzzins!” shouts the barbecue man, who was not in on the earlier joke. The girl’s mother looks back at her husband and states his name with exaggerated severity, shaking her head as if to say, He never gets anything!

  “What? What?” the barbecue man asks, shrugging, looking to the other man with a Who can figure women? look on his face, and they all laugh again, because for them this is the way men and women are like together when things are good.

  The girl squeals as her feet sink into the weedy mush that lurks just off from where the sand stops, then steps into her position with two athletic swings of her legs. With a final push the boy kneels in the back and puts fifty feet between the canoe and their parents’ laughter in three strokes.

  “Wanna go to the island?” the girl asks. This is the place they usually head for. It has a high granite point rising up out of the tree cover from which you can see almost half of the lake’s inlets and jetties. It’s also where, at the end of last summer’s Labor Day weekend, the two cousins made out for the first time.

  “No. Let’s go to the beaver dam.”

  “That’s far.”

  “That’s far,” he mimics, which she hates, because he’s good at it.

  They turn away from the island, which lies a half-mile straight ahead of the cottage’s beach, and toward the mouth of an unnamed river beyond it.

  “I don’t want to go home,” she says without turning.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want to stay up here. For the summer not to end.”

  “But it does end. It gets cold, the lake freezes over, and there’s no TV.”

  “I don’t care. It just makes me sad that we can do this, now—all this stuff together—and soon I’ll be back home and you’ll be back home, dealing with all the dickheads at our schools and whatever. It’s just shitty, that’s all.”

  “I know.”

  “And I miss you. I mean, I know I’m going to miss you.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I wish—” she exhales, but doesn’t continue. The boy knows what she means, and that she is a girl full of wishes.

  As they near the beaver dam she pulls her paddle in and turns around to face the boy. Smiles, tilts her head back to absorb the last heat of the day’s sun. The boy studies the galaxy of pale freckles that crosses her chest and clusters in the space above her small breasts. Her hair, red-brown in winter and blonde in summer, falls straight back and reaches down almost to the water. She makes a low moaning at the back of her throat and stretches her legs out in front of her, wriggling her toes until he quietly brings his own paddle in and grabs them.

  “And these little piggies got barbecued!” he cackles, and the girl screams, famously ticklish. The
n she comes forward and kisses him.

  “Kissin’ cuzzins,” she says.

  “Wait. Let’s get to shore first.”

  The boy maneuvers them in the last twenty yards to the river’s mouth, into the reeds, tapegrass and coontails. Once he steps out onto the shore he takes the girl’s arm and half guides, half lifts her to where he stands. As their feet sink into the softness of the river’s edge the smell of rot rises out of the ground, the decomposition of fish and slug and frog.

  “Ugh. Stinks like shit!” the girl shrieks, though the boy knows it isn’t that, but the stink of dead things.

  “They’re getting ready to eat.”

  The boy squints back across the water at the miniaturized figures of the adults, who are now ambling up to the picnic table and fetching more drinks. Once they leave the sunny spot by the lake they disappear into the shadows, just as the boy and girl, if you were to look for them from where the adults had sat, are concealed by the lengthening darkness.

  “Should we go back?” the girl asks.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll take our time.”

  They sludge along the water’s edge to where the beaver has blocked a narrow point in the river with twigs, fallen tree limbs, even a found section of hockey stick, all held together by dried mud. The boy walks a few feet out onto the dam and extends his hand for her to follow. Beneath his feet the passing water sucks and gurgles, the meshed-together wood creaking under his weight.

  “No! Get off! It’s the beaver’s house!” the girl calls to him with a mixture of protest and delight.

  “C’mon. Don’t worry. It’s abandoned. It’s gone somewhere else now, so it doesn’t matter,” the boy lies. He knows nothing of beavers or which mushrooms can be eaten in the woods or how to tell compass directions from the stars, but he tells the girl stories about all of these things.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  The girl takes his hand and steps up beside him, close enough that he has to circle his arm behind her back to prevent her from falling in. Her breath, sweet-smelling and spicy as cinnamon, warms his neck.

  “C’mere,” he whispers, although she can move no closer. Then he lowers his head and kisses her, moves his tongue inside her mouth and his hands to her hips to hold her in place. They have kissed before, but this summer things have been different. They felt different. But one thing that’s the same is that when they kiss he keeps his eyes open and she closes hers. He likes this almost more than the smooth invitation of her lips. To watch her eyelids come down like sleep so that he can watch her pleasure without being seen himself.

  When they pull apart they hold each other still for a time, each listening to the other’s shallow breaths. In the single moment of their silence the dusk has begun its advance. From the blackening trees behind them lights appear, pinpricks of color. Without a word, the boy and girl watch them emerge, fireflies flashing through the branches and high grass. Hundreds of flickering communications moving forward from the woods.

  “It’s like they’re talking to each other,” the girl says.

  “It’s beautiful. Nice.” The boy counts to three in his head. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. “C’mon, let’s get back in the canoe. It’ll be more comfortable.”

  The boy turns and picks his way back from where they have come and when he steps off the dam he wonders if the beaver is out there in the woods, watching them.

  “Let’s go!” he shouts back to the girl, and she turns to follow. When she meets him at the canoe she climbs in first and then he pushes them off, his feet making a foul suctioning sound in the mud as they go. Without speaking they slowly paddle around the river’s mouth, watching small pike, rock bass and tadpoles flash through the water at the disturbance of their wake. Then the boy directs them out into the open lake and, once they reach the middle, stops and pulls the paddle in. Watches the perfect stretch of her back, the soft crease of skin at her sunburned neck.

  “Hey,” the boy says, and the girl turns to him, placing her paddle next to his.

  “Hey what?”

  “Hey, you look amazing. Here, in the light.”

  The boy moves forward, steadying the canoe with his hands on the sides. Then he kneels before the girl, cups her face in his palms. “Amazing.”

  He kisses her hard and she makes a sound, an indeterminable sigh of submission or resistance. As his fingers go to work—pulling, pressing, positioning—he holds his mouth over hers to keep her from speaking. But eventually he has to pull back to arrange his own body into the right angle, and when she opens her mouth it’s not to say Don’t but “Please,” her voice constricted with panic. She asks him to stop without calling him by name—just please—for to the girl he was no longer her cousin but something else, a wild, rabid thing, like the bear she’d once seen frothing and wailing down by the landfill before the provincial police shot it through the skull.

  “Don’t move. You’ll tip it,” the boy whispers. But she doesn’t want to move. What she wants is to lie so still it makes him stop. So she closes her eyes, stiffens her back straight over the jabbing aluminum ribs of the canoe’s hull and imagines herself floating on the perfect line between water and sky. But still there is his breath, his strong fingers, the weight of his thighs pressing down on hers.

  For a moment the boy stops and she opens her eyes to see him scrabbling with the clasp on his shorts and the zipper below it. With a grunt he falls back and pulls them down, ripping the seam and kicking them off his feet onto her chest. Then he comes forward again and brushes his mouth next to her ear.

  “C’mon,” he whispers. It’s all he can think of to say. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon. He wishes she were different—older and inviting, like the faceless women of his imagination—not this girl with bony hips and a face he knows too well pinched up in fear. He doesn’t want this. He wants a dream. So he closes his eyes, fumbling with himself, and just as this and the sway of the canoe and the blooming heat within him begin to feel more like what he wants he is awakened by her screams.

  He tries to shush her but she screams even more, banging the sides with her fists and slamming her heels into his back. The screaming doesn’t stop even after he pulls back from her and tells her it’s O.K., it’s over, he’s sorry, he won’t try it again. Checks over his shoulder in the direction of the cottage to see if her sounds have brought anyone down to the beach but he can’t tell, his view blinded by the lowering sun. When he turns his head back again the girl is struggling to stand up, one hand waving in the air and the other pushing down on the side. The shadow of her cut against the dim sky, looking down at him with both recognition and horror. Then, in the same moment—in the same half-moment—that she gets to her feet the canoe moves into a fluid spin that pushes them both below the water.

  Cold.

  It’s the cold that shocks the blood in their hearts and cramps their muscles as soon as they begin thrashing for the surface. The boy keeps his eyes closed but reaches up, searching for the overturned canoe and soon finding it. With a single pull his head breaks through into the air and he takes in a hungry gasp. How long had he been down there? Five seconds? Long enough to make his chest ache. For a time he holds his arms over the slippery hull and simply breathes. Then he remembers the girl.

  Calls her name once, but doesn’t shout it.

  Nothing.

  No sound but the lapping of water against his shoulders. Where was she? Both of them good swimmers but she better than he, faster and with far greater endurance. She should have been beside him, spitting water in his face, or a hundred yards off kicking her way to shore. But she wasn’t. The boy knows he has to go under to find her, but it feels so cold down there. A difference of several degrees between armpits and toes. It’s the cold that frightens him.

  The first time he goes down only a few feet before twisting back up, eyes closed against the ima
gined sight of bug-eyed snakes and glowing, tentacled jellyfish. Gnashes at the air.

  On the second dive he takes as large a breath as his lungs will allow and flutters down against his own buoyancy, eyes still closed, hands reaching before him. Then he feels her. Not any actual part of her body, but the vibrations of her struggle radiating out through the water. Down, further down. When he begins to feel the muscles in his jaw ache to pull his mouth open he tells himself to turn back but nothing obeys and he goes two strokes further yet.

  And finds her arm. Slides his hand up and bracelets her wrist with his fingers. Then he kicks like hell.

  But the girl feels heavy, heavier than she should, as though attached to a sack of wet sand. A dozen sacks of wet sand. The pain that comes with the lack of oxygen now a bell tolling in the boy’s head but he doesn’t let her go, pushing against the weight with the last of his strength until his free arm knocks against the underside of the canoe.

  Even with the leverage of his fingers locked around the hull’s edge the girl is still too heavy to bring up with him. His shoulder strains, his toes brush through her hair but she moves no further. Then he feels a tug. A sharp force from below her which nearly takes him down too. Then another.

  It’s not that the girl is too heavy for him to pull up. Something else is pulling the other way.

  With the third tug she’s gone.

  The boy pulls his head through to the light, counts to two and goes under once more. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. This time, when he’s down as far as he can go and moves his arms out to feel for her, there’s nothing there.

  He tells himself not to do it, that it will be too horrible and do no good, but he does anyway. He looks.

  What he notices first is that the opening of his eyes also opens his ears, because it is only then that he hears his cousin’s scream. Then he sees her scream, her gaping mouth blowing a diminishing stream of bubbles up toward him before breaking soundlessly at the surface. But as she runs out of air her scream becomes something worse, a moaning inhalation of the lake’s purple weight. Eyes a wild white, blonde hair now black as oil, writhing out from her head like eels. Fingers grasping up toward the light, at him, at anything, but when they stop they are frozen into gnarled fists.