Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

We all climbed out and Lou Anne took the rug from me, snatched it away before I could offer to carry it. I went to lift the picnic basket from the boot, but she took that, too. The lake was gray and still, as black as onyx out at the center. Lou Anne spread the rug on a patch of grass and sat on it, looking out at the lake, the picnic basket unopened beside her. Cassie was already struggling out of her clothes, discarding them in a haphazard fashion for Marcus to gather up, until she was down to a navy one-piece. I noticed, and was ashamed of noticing, that her legs were heavily dimpled with cellulite and marked with long blue veins. Marcus had rolled up the ends of his trousers. He held out a hand to Cassie and motioned toward the water, but she crouched on the shingle. Scattered over the surface were dragonflies, all of them dead, felled perhaps by a recent turn in the weather, because even with the sunshine, it was colder here than in the city. She picked one up, but it came apart, leaving her holding only its leg. Scolding loudly, she began to gather others, arranging them in a line on top of a large stone.

I took off my shoes and socks, slid my jeans down to my ankles, and stepped out of them. I pulled my T-shirt over my head, the hairs on my arms standing up in little spiky forests. I was in only my bikini now, and I put one hand behind my back to check that the string was fastened. Without looking at Marcus, I walked the short distance to the water. The shingle hurt my feet, but I kept walking. The cold, when I waded in, was excruciating, but I steeled myself against it, kept walking out until the water lapped the top of my thighs and then I stopped, still with my back to him, to allow him to look at me. I’d stubbed my toe on a stone and knew it must be bleeding, but I didn’t care. I stood in the freezing water and let him look, while I stared across at the hills on the other side of the lake. The fields were better tended there, with fences, and a farmhouse standing in a clearing like something from a Constable painting. There was a pasture dotted with black-and-white cows, all so quiet and neatly ordered, tiny and far away. I dived down into the water, imagining how I would appear from the shore, the arc of my back, the red of the bikini against the white of my skin. I swam out farther, stopping to tread water somewhere around the middle. Only then did I look back.

Marcus was faced away from the lake, talking to Lou Anne. She was still sitting on the rug, fully clothed, with a towel wrapped around her shoulders. Cassie was a little farther off, scrabbling after her insects in the shingle. Marcus and Lou Anne were speaking in raised voices, but I was too far out to hear what was being said. All around me the water was black and still, and when I looked down at my feet they appeared white and ghostly. Back onshore, Marcus began to gesticulate. Lou Anne jumped to her feet, discarding the towel. She stood within inches of Marcus, waving her arms about, at one point shouting. Then she was walking away from him, breaking after a while into a run, getting smaller and smaller until she disappeared into the trees.

Marcus stared after her for a moment before turning, at last, to the lake. He stood with his hands on his hips, his gaze fixed on me as I continued to tread water. He stripped to his swim shorts, and waded in. As he swam, I watched his dark head approaching like an otter, and when he drew close, I turned and headed for the opposite bank. I stood in the shallows, waiting, like some creature emerged from the deep, water running in rivulets down my body. He scooped me up without saying anything and laid me down behind an evergreen bush that provided a screen of sorts. He struggled with the ties of my bikini top until, reaching behind, I undid it for him. He climbed on top of me then with none of the preamble of the last time and, pulling my bikini bottoms to one side, pushed into me, his mouth on mine, one hand kneading my breast. He thrust into me hard and fast, pressing me down into the mud, so that I imagined an indent forming like a worm cast that come winter would harden and fossilize. He groaned and collapsed onto my chest, and we lay there together, mud on my arms and between my legs, my hair glued into rope-thick strands, like a bird taken from an oil slick.

He pulled out of me suddenly, and, sitting up, he began putting back on his swim trunks. I sat up, too, noticing only then Lou Anne’s voice coming from the other side of the lake. I looked about for my bikini top, found it floating at the water’s edge. Marcus was halfway across by the time I’d tied the strings and set out after him. I could see Lou Anne up to her waist in the water. She was calling for Cassie and Marcus, and then Cassie again. Marcus reached her, took her by the arm, and dragged her to the shore. She tried to fight him off, but he gripped her by the shoulders. “Listen to me,” he said. “She’s not in the water. She wouldn’t have gone in by herself, you know that.”

“How do you know what she’d have done?” Lou Anne said, and she wrested herself free of him. “What makes you think you know anything about my daughter?” I had reached them now and stood shivering beside Marcus. Lou Anne waded past us, back into the lake, and thrashed to and fro, churning up the water until it grew brown and cloudy and it was impossible to see anything.

“She followed you into the woods,” I said. While it had formed as a half thought, a possibility, I knew as soon as I had voiced it that this was what must have happened. Lou Anne took off right away, running toward the trees. Marcus and I struggled into our clothes and shoes and ran after her. A short distance into the woods, the path split, one trail continuing on straight, the other leading uphill in a less defined route. Marcus stopped, as did I, but Lou Anne carried on uphill. “It has to be this one,” she said. “I’d have seen her if she took the other.” Litter began to appear along the side of the trail — empty crisp packets, dirty nappies — signs that we were headed back toward the main road. The path widened, became more defined, and I saw a brightness up ahead. No one was talking now. Marcus and Lou Anne were in front, behaving as if I weren’t there. When Lou Anne’s foot caught on a tree root, Marcus reached out to steady her and she took his hand, kept hold of it as they ran on. And then we were out of the trees and standing on the hard shoulder of a road, blinking in the sudden sunshine. It was the road we’d driven down earlier before turning onto the dirt track, because I recognized a field that had caught my attention. It was laid out like a gymkhana, and now a man was putting a gray horse through its paces, riding it over a series of jumps constructed from colorful poles.

“There she is!” Lou Anne said. I squinted and saw Cassie some twenty yards away, just after the turnoff for the lake where the main road disappeared around a bend. She was a strange sight in her swimsuit, like something beached or shipwrecked, a mermaid from a childhood story with her fair hair loose around her shoulders. She had her back to us and was walking along the middle of the road, about to turn the corner. From that distance there was something stately about her, something ethereal, and as the light caught her hair she appeared almost transfigured. “Cassie!” Lou Anne shouted. She turned then, Cassie, and saw us. She didn’t immediately come toward us, but she must have recognized us, because she waved. Lou Anne was still holding Marcus’s hand, and in the field alongside, the man was still riding his horse, a steady drum of hooves fractured by small silences as he cleared each jump. A car came around the corner. It struck Cassie, tossing her into the air, her legs at a strange angle to her body. She landed on the car bonnet, where she traveled for a few yards before the car skidded to a halt, depositing her onto the road.