When I was a little girl, my parents rented a lakeside cottage. The owners would be out of town for a year, and they needed someone to keep an eye on their property, so they rented it to us cheap. My sisters and I were excited about living next to a lake with tiny islands to explore.
Down the hill from our house was a small beach with a private dock. My father bought an old rowboat and patched up the holes in the hull, while painted turtles sunned themselves on the shore and king snakes curled in the grass like warm inner tubes.
That summer, I dangled my feet over the end of the wooden dock and searched the water for sunfish or bluegills. Sometimes I’d catch a glint of something bigger, an eel or a whiskery trout gliding past my toes and then disappearing into darkness. As much as I loved it there, I was secretly terrified of the cold blue depths of the lake. That summer, I read a paperback mystery about a camp counselor who was killed and dumped in a lake, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.
I refused to go swimming unless my father was watching over us. I hated that I couldn’t see the bottom. Whenever I walked barefoot into the murky water, I could feel my toes squishing through matted patches of pondweed, while slippery quillwort tangled around my ankles. Living things lurked in the slimy undergrowth—tadpoles, eels, snails, fish, hermit crabs. I dreaded stepping on something sharp and cutting my foot. Worst of all, I imagined that one of these days, a skeletal hand would reach out of the primordial ooze and pull me under.
I thought about dead bodies a lot, probably more than a little girl should. One day when I was playing on the dock, an old knotted plastic bag drifted ashore. Inside was a waterlogged napkin from a local diner, a pink barrette, a bottle of crimson nail polish, and a laminated nametag that said “Rita.” I waited around all afternoon, but nothing else washed ashore. No dead bodies, no waitresses named Rita.
I didn’t tell anyone what I’d found. Instead I hid the nametag and other stuff in a shoebox under my bed and invented a story about how Rita came to rest at the cold still bottom of the lake.
In my story, there was a jealous man—a line cook at the diner—who’d fallen in love with Rita and her crimson nails, but then one night after closing, after she rejected his advances, he flew into a rage and killed her. He got rid of the body by weighing it down with a cement block and rowing out to the middle of the lake, where he pushed her overboard. It was gruesome, and I loved it.
In my imagination, Rita sank into the cold, still bottom of the lake and remained there in her watery grave, while far above the seasons passed. In the summer, the sun blazed and the wind danced on the surface of the water, but not a single beam or ripple reached down to the depths of the lake. In the fall, lightning crashed and thunderstorms riled the choppy waves, but the bottom of the lake remained dark, inert and silent.
I wasn’t sure how my story would end.
But then, real life provided one possibility.
It was early September when a terrifyingly loud noise shook me and my sisters out of bed. We huddled together in the living room, while my mother explained, “The dam broke. That sound was the lake whooshing away. We’re lucky it happened in the middle of the night when nobody was swimming in it.” She shuddered to think about her three daughters getting sucked away.
Since we were on high ground, we were safe from the flood waters, but the people who lived below us were almost dragged away. Trees crashed into roofs and smashed through windows, and muddy water flooded basements.
Fortunately, no one was killed.
The next day, my sisters and I hurried down the hill to see what was left of the lake, but the whole thing was gone. Our little dock extended out into nothing, the drop deep into water-speckled mud, where small fish splashed around in the remaining puddles.
It was sunny out—a beautiful September day. We climbed down the wooden ladder onto the lake bottom, where the mudflats bore our weight like sandbars at the beach. Everywhere you looked, the mud was littered with trash—fishing poles, plastic buckets, flip-flops, boards with rusty nails sticking out. Dead fish floated belly-up, while a few still-living fish twitched their fins and snapped their gills, trying to wriggle into the deeper pools. Everything smelled rotten in the strong sun.
My sisters and I explored for hours. We found a wine bottle filled with mud, a diving fin, a battered capsized rowboat, a golf club, and more than a few rotten oars. I looked around for Rita’s body. My feverish imagination had convinced me she would be there, half-buried in the muck, her long silky hair turned to seaweed, her waitress uniform the color of algae, her skeletal waist tied to a cement block by a length of water-logged rope. Needless to say, I didn’t find any dead bodies that day.
For weeks afterwards, I checked the news, but there were no reports of any Rita’s being retrieved from the lake. I suppose I should’ve been relieved, but that didn’t explain the plastic bag and its contents that had floated toward me like a ghostly plea for help. I was a little girl with a big imagination, and I needed an ending for my story. So I figured the lake must’ve swallowed her up completely. It had claimed her as its own.