Page 6 of The Deepest Lake
“Depends on whether you’re in England or America. But cards aren’t my specialty. It was just an easier thing to write about in a fluffy, short essay.”
Rose doesn’t think it was so fluffy. In a few pages, Lindsay told the story of a mistake she’d made, having dinner and sleeping with an unfamiliar man she needed to beat in a poker tournament the next day. She managed to keep up her false pretense of being a poker novice, but learning about his pending divorce and financial problems added friction to the con. That was the word Lindsay used. Not guilt. Just friction.
“I wanted to read more. You’re a good writer,” Rose says. “Is that the wrong thing to say?”
She has no idea how to talk about the pages people submitted. Back home, she doesn’t even belong to a book club.
“I don’t think anyone minds being called a good writer,” Lindsay says, pushing her sunglasses on top of her head. Long lashes, plenty of sparkly olive-hued eyeshadow: she isn’t concerned about Eva’s no-makeup suggestion.
Rose wonders if they will have to worry about Lindsay. Surely, you can’t trust someone who steals for a living.
“Actually,” Rose adds, “I was surprised by how little Eva asked us to hand in. How could she judge if people were, you know . . . serious about writing?”
Isobel leans closer to them, whispering. “Fewer than half the women turned in manuscripts. Ana Sofía told me. Several women just sent emails about what they wanted to write, or nothing at all.”
Now Rose understands. It isn’t actually a selective workshop, like the website claimed. Maybe it’s more like summer camp.
“Anyway,” Rose says to Lindsay, “it’s hard to tell any story in two thousand words. But both of yours grabbed me from the first paragraph.”
“Thank you,” Lindsay says.
Isobel smiles. “You’re not going to tell us whether our submissions were any good.”
“No.” Lindsay’s face is bright, relaxed. Her posture is impeccable.
Isobel says, “You don’t want to lie to us, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“But you’re sort of a professional liar.”
“Yes. But I’m on vacation.”
Rose finds herself staring at them both, wishing she could borrow a touch of Lindsay’s self-assurance, a little of Isobel’s color and shine. They must find her plain. Jules once criticized her mother for dressing like a kitchen cabinet. Mom, do you even own a sweater that isn’t white, gray, black or brown? She told herself to buy some more colorful shirts. To schedule a shopping trip with Jules.
And then, Rose ran out of time. Clients wanted their remodels finished well before Memorial Day. Weeks flew by. Jules left on her trip. Too late.
“Is the altitude bothering you?” Isobel asks, gesturing to a rusty garden bench at the back of the shady garden. “Do you need to sit? Let me get you something to drink.”
Rose doesn’t want to sit. She’s breathing heavily, almost sighing on the exhales, as if she can’t get enough oxygen. From the corner of her eye, she sees a young woman leaning against the pile of luggage in the center of the open-air reception patio. Dark blond hair, an eyebrow ring and admirably muscular quads, visible beneath a sporty, wraparound skirt. Rose thinks: Jules.
The hallucination lasts no more than a second. She’s had these flashes countless times—in Chicago, at the airport in Houston, now here. She knows there are parents of missing children who imagine their children will show up one day, but that isn’t Rose’s issue. She believes Jules died in the lake. She doesn’t think her daughter is wandering the world as an amnesiac or ran off to join a cult or was ambushed by aliens or drug traffickers—the sorts of “helpful” suggestions that popped up on social media and in the Chicago Tribune comments section, waning within mere days, as public attention migrated to fresher tragedies.
Maybe it was the nightmares that convinced Rose, because they felt like a vivid glimpse into Jules’s final moments. They started the day Matt called home from San Felipe with the authorities’ conclusion of Jules’s likely fate. Ever since, Rose has woken up at least once each night, gasping. The nightmares are telling her: Jules is gone. The universe has given her a piece of the truth—just not all of it. So, when will the sightings and the nightmares stop?
It will stop when you properly grieve.
Matt told her that. As did her sister, via long distance phone call.
Jules wasn’t a runaway, she was a young woman at the end of a pleasant trip, ready to come home. Someone saw her in the lake. The last time she texted, she was drinking and maybe dabbling beyond that. She wasn’t a good swimmer. What more is there to know?
A lot, Rose thought. Everything important. Why and how. Her daughter’s last hours. Why she was swimming when she hated to swim. Whether she was depressed and suffering, or just unlucky.
Her therapist came closest to understanding, “You need a narrative. That’s how humans are. We are story-making creatures—some of us more than others. Your husband needs facts—maybe just one fact. That Jules drowned. You need a story.”
Yes, she does. But Rose is afraid of stories, too.
There’s something about being here in person, with the lake’s smell of fish and boat gasoline still in her nostrils and the sound of Spanish in her ears, that makes her feel uncomfortably far from home—and dangerously close to admitting Matt was right to question her trip. Rose might be doing something worse than wasting time. She might have come all the way to Guatemala only to prove she didn’t know her daughter as well as she thought, meaning she was a bad mother: unobservant, clueless, insufficiently caring. That’s an even more terrifying prospect than discovering nothing.