Page 24 of The Deepest Lake
Stupid stupid stupid.
“K,” she whisper-shouts, hoarsely. “Did you see my bag anywhere?”
“Like a purse?”
Rose can see it like a glowing X-ray: the pasted printout of Eva’s police statement. What would a fellow workshopper think? What would Barbara, Chef Hans or Eva herself think?
“No, like a shoulder bag. Royal blue. Papers and notebooks and an e-reader inside. I think I left it at the party.”
Maybe it’s sitting in the grass, under a table, in the dark. She can get there before dawn. She can retrieve it somehow.
“Oh yeah,” K laughs. “That bag. You were clutching it to your chest like a baby.”
“Yes?”
“Yeah. It’s downstairs.”
Rose feels sick with relief. Bringing a shaking hand to her forehead, she notices how clammy it is. If she moves too quickly, she’ll get the spins.
“How did I get home?”
“It wasn’t bad. No cars. Bats overhead. You wobbled. But we got here.”
“You walked with me. Thank you.”
“I insisted. I didn’t like how that woman was talking to you.”
“Eva?”
“She was in the house and missed the whole thing. It was the other woman. The big one.”
Now she remembers K making her own fuss, saying to Barbara, I live on Chicago’s South Side. I’m not afraid of walking a mile on a road without traffic. Give me a fucking break. Don’t tell a grown woman what she can’t do. Stand aside, Frankenstein.
So that wasn’t just a mean, silent thought. K had called Barbara “Frankenstein.”
“But it was Lindsay who got you all the way to your cabin,” K says. “The last quarter mile through town, I had to pee so bad I took off.”
Rose tries to dig up a memory of walking with K—then K running ahead to pee—and Lindsay sticking with her for the final drunken ramble. Her mind is a blank. A complete, blackout void, of the type she hasn’t experienced since college.
“Oh, god,” is all Rose can say, horrified by her amnesia.
“It’s fine. I mean, you were crying, but it was fine.”
Crying? It couldn’t get any worse. She just hopes she wasn’t talking.
Hours later, Rose still can’t sleep. It’s nearly dawn but the drums are still going.
Outside the cabin, pulling the door shut carefully so she doesn’t wake her downstairs roommates, Rose wishes she’d brought a jacket. She keeps forgetting that Lake Atitlán is high altitude—dry and often cool, not steamy hot.
Most of the stars are obscured by a high veil of thin clouds, but every now and again, the moon becomes visible, sending its light down to the lake, making it shimmer. Farther out, in the middle of the lake, there’s one ribbon of water that’s glassier than the rest. Maybe that’s a current of warmer water, Rose thinks, breathing heavily as she barely catches herself from falling a second time.
She hops from the last of the big rocks to a flatter area of dry pebbles just a little larger than beans. Grubby black beans. A beautiful sand beach, this is not.
She postholes with effort, keeping her eyes fixed on the bonfire ahead, far down the beach. Shadows move. The bongo drums get louder, the flames brighter as she approaches. A loud pop, and sparks climb into the sky.
Now, she can smell pot. Voices rise above the drumming, blending at first, then breaking into the tinkle and squeal of a girl laughing and two boys talking over each other, in good spirits. One pushes the other and he staggers sideways, opening a gap in the bodies around the fire.
“Hey,” a person says as Rose reaches the edge of the circle, hands in her sweatpants pockets.