THE DEEP PURPLE WATER-SKY TREMBLES above them, with stars made out of a million of the smallest bubbles. The illusion of earth and lake bottom turns into the soft, inviting blackness. An instinctive burst of energy courses through Lucy’s system, and she pushes forward faster.
“God, I can’t wait to get there,” Colin says, floating behind her. “I hope we can stay longer this time. I want to try the gate again.”
Lucy doesn’t respond, simply kicks her feet through the icy clear water. It’s all she’s been able to think about: how her skin looked like real flesh, that she felt the sting of the cold air on her fingertips, but she’s worried there’s something they haven’t considered yet.
It’s strange to not be able to see but to know exactly where to turn, like the directions are embedded in her muscles. Does he feel it too?
“Can you find it?” she asks, stilling.
“What?” He stops next to her, his arm pressed along the length of hers.
“Do you remember how to get there? Could you find it on your own?”
He looks behind them, to where the water has simply emptied into blackness, and then forward again. “Not like this. I can’t see anything. I don’t think this is how we got here before.”
“Never mind,” she says, grabbing his hand to pull him closer. “I guess it’s a feel thing. Maybe after you’ve been here a few more times.”
“Maybe,” he says, though he sounds unsure.
A few seconds later, she instinctively turns. A light in the distance grows brighter and brighter.
It takes a moment for their eyes to adjust, but everything is exactly as they left it. A canopy of crystalline leaves sparkles above them. The sun is a trapezoidal beam of yellow sweeping across the frozen shore. Orange, blue, red, and purple flowers bloom in small pops before they freeze, leaving waves of stained-glass color in their wake. A light snow is falling, and Colin holds out his hand; intricate, lacy snowflakes land in his palm.
She grins at him, watching him look around. It’s everything at once: vibrant color and glistening ice. They can smell the wet earth beneath the snow and hear the water freeze across the lake. It becomes disorienting and overwhelming, and she can see the moment it becomes too much for him when he sits on the bank and covers his eyes.
She sits next to him, resting her hand on his bent knee. “Are you okay?”
“I love you,” he says quietly, slowly blinking up to the sky.
She breaks into a grin so wide it takes her several seconds to respond. “I love you back.”
He picks up her hand and massages her fingers. “I thought I knew what love was before.”
“I didn’t.” She leans down, kisses the back of his hand.
Colin looks over at her, his eyes as hungry as she feels when she pushes him onto his back in the snow.
“Cold?” she asks, moving over him.
He shakes his head, hands running up her sides, lifting her shirt up and off in a single movement. “Not even a little.”
Her hair falls in a curtain around them, and he pushes it back, kissing her like she’s a normal girl he can grip and feel and not worry about breaking.
Lucy wonders if time moves down here at all because before she knows it her clothes are gone and Colin is smiling down at her, snowflakes in his hair and clinging to his lashes, disappearing into the skin of his bare shoulders. He bites his lip as he moves above her, fingers memorizing every inch and finding where they come together.
Frost gathers on their skin and disappears as quickly. Light explodes behind her eyes, and Colin holds her shaking hands with his. He says her name against her mouth, that he loves her, that even having all of her will never be enough. He groans into her neck, and when they still, his heart silent against her chest, she can hear the sound of feathery snow falling around them.
- • •
“How’s it possible to feel like I want to be here with you but I shouldn’t be?” he asks. They’re on the trail again, hand in hand as they make their way toward the front of the school. Lucy tried to say no—to distract him—but there wasn’t any conviction behind her words.
“I don’t know,” she says, “but it’s how I feel bringing you here too. It feels selfish.”
“Lucy?” he says, and she watches a cloud of anxiety pass through his eyes. “I think this is what we’ve been missing. Don’t you?”
She looks up, watches how fast the sun seems to move across the snowy sky. She can feel it with every step: the need to keep going, to escape.
They stop with the iron gate in front of them, its hulking mass like a scar blooming out of the pristine snow. Lucy notices Colin rubbing the spot over his sternum. “Jay’s bringing me back. My chest hurts,” he says. “We don’t have much time, Luce.”
He reaches for her then, pulling her to him with a smile that doesn’t completely fill his eyes. His mouth is soft but insistent, wet and warm.
She turns, a sense of longing filling her chest like a warm bath, a tug behind her ribs pushing her toward whatever is on the other side of the fence.
The same feeling of anticipation coats her skin, and she reaches out to lift the latch. The old gate groans, the hinges squeak, and Lucy steps back as it swings open.
She twists her fingers with his, and as if acting on instinct, steps through first.
She hears the gasp before she’s even turned around. He’s smiling. Tear tracks line his face, and he’s looking at her as if she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
“Your hair,” he says. She looks down. It’s brown, every shade of brown at once. “And your eyes.” He’s laughing now, disbelief etched in every part of his face. “They’re green.”
“Come here,” she says, and pulls him forward.
- • •
She’s on the old trail again. Her feet dig easily into the snowy earth, but she almost trips on a bank of snow when she catches sight of Jay, curled in half and throwing up the contents of his stomach several feet away from where Colin’s body lies.
Colin’s lips are blue, and when she gets closer, she can see that his eyes are open, but hollow and staring straight up at the heavy gray sky. His chest rises and falls in shallow pants, but when he hears her feet crunching across the ice, he turns his head to her and tries to smile. His breathing grows more ragged; his eyes roll closed.
“GET AWAY FROM HIM!” Jay screams, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and stumbling to Colin, shoving Lucy out of the way. “I just got him back, Lucy. Stay away from him!”
Jay’s eyes are squeezed shut. He refuses to look at her.
“What happened, Jay? Why is he so bad?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he mumbles. “It’s not working.” Still, he keeps his eyes down, frantically shoving hand warmers under the blankets and against Colin’s cold skin.
Dread trickles along her arms. “Are you afraid of me?”
“When he comes back, you look fucking terrifying,” he says, voice shaking in the cold. He points without looking. “Grab that bag; it has gloves.”
She walks to the bag numbly, Jay’s words echoing over and over. He’s said it before: When he comes back, you look terrifying.
It’s the same reaction Joe had when he fell through his porch. He told Colin she looked like a demon. Lucy feels the high of her time with Colin underwater begin to evaporate.
“Here,” she says, carefully handing Jay the gloves. “What can I do? Is he going to be okay?” Her voice is so flat, sounds so indifferent. She squeezes her eyes shut, unable to get rid of the image of Colin in front of her, smiling up into the sun right before he slipped away.
“He’s been under for more than an hour, Lucy! He’s nonresponsive with a pulse of thirty. Thirty! His normal resting pulse is sixty-four. Do you even know what that means? He might die!”
“Just let me closer; he’ll be better when I’m there.” She’s so sure of it that at first she doesn’t register that when she puts her hand on his arm, the small monitor at his side lets out a steady, flat beep.
“Lucy!” Jay gasps, pulling at her arm and staring where his hand wraps firmly around her flesh. “Go away. Go away. Go away,” he whispers over and over. She realizes she was completely wrong when she assumed a silent Jay is a panicked Jay. This Jay is panicked, and he’s unable to stop whispering to himself. He’s a rubber band pulled taut, about to snap.
“Let’s get him to the dorm,” she says. “I think I can help you carry him. I feel so strong.”
“No. Don’t touch him again. I don’t think you’re helping.”
“Of course I’m helping. Jay, we have to get him out of here. You can’t carry him alone!”
Sirens wail in the distance, and Jay meets her eyes, apology and fear and anger and fresh tears brimming inside. “I called nine-one-one. I didn’t know what else to do.”
The ambulance crunches along the trail, coming to a skidding stop. Paramedics burst from every door, rushing to Colin’s body, pulling away the blankets and heat pads, checking his vitals. They wrap him in some type of bag and pepper Jay with questions. How did he go in? How long was he under? Has he said anything? Jay answers, wooden. No one even looks at Lucy.
She watches as the two men lift Colin onto a stretcher. His hand reaches out weakly, and she waves.
“I’ll meet you there.” Somehow, she thinks. Her thoughts grow panicked and jumbled as the ambulance starts up, beeping loudly in the echoing quiet of the lake as it backs down the trail. How can she possibly follow him?
She runs toward the school, and in the distance, sees Joe and Dot begin jogging to the parking lot. Brake lights flash on a shiny blue pickup truck as Joe unlocks the doors with a remote.
Without thinking, Lucy sprints to the truck, crouching behind the back gate. Just as the two passengers shut their doors, Lucy throws her body over the side, into the open bed.
Gravel spits up behind them as they peel out of the lot, chasing the ambulance down the dirt road leading out of the school.
It’s only when they pass through the iron gates that Lucy realizes she hasn’t been bounced back to the trail. Ahead of them, the ambulance wails down the two-lane highway.
But why now? What’s changed? She looks up to the flashing lights down the road, to where her heart lies, strapped into the back of an ambulance. Where you go, I go, she thinks.
Always.
- • •
“Eighteen-year-old male, severe hypothermia. BP ninety over fifty-four. Current temp is ninety-four point eight, respiratory rate fourteen. Lactated ringers pushed at one hundred fifty milliliters an hour. EKG stable with normal sinus rhythm. Chest X-ray results are here for your review. Blood work was sent to the lab for stat processing.”
Lucy pushes her way into the corner about ten feet from where a physician is looking down at Colin’s chart while one of the paramedics ticks off the vitals. Lucy has managed to walk into the triage area without anyone saying a single word to her.
The attending physician listens to the account of the scene: The kids were playing on the lake, Colin went in, they had equipment to revive him, and it seemed intentional.
“Isn’t this the kid they were talking about on the news? Around Christmas?”
“Colin Novak. From Saint O’s.”
“Yeah.” The doctor gently pushes hair off of Colin’s forehead. “That’s him.”
Lucy turns as they wheel him away and through two wide doors. She wanders the halls until she can’t take the beeping and antiseptic smell and chatting nurses. She’s glad for them that the stress of the ER becomes as tolerable as with any other job, but their conversation about the recently passed Valentine’s Day is too far removed from the updates on Colin she wants to be hearing. She wants news about him blared through the intercom.
She wishes she were a ghost like on television, only as solid as a hologram. She’d be able to walk through walls and into any room, peek her head through and watch the color return to Colin’s skin.
On her seventh circuit of the halls, she peers into the family waiting room. Jay is gone, but Dot remains and stares, unseeing, out of a large window that overlooks the parking lot. There’s no one here to comfort her, and there’s no one here to comfort Lucy. She steps into the dark, silent room, ready to share her loneliness.
Dot is so lost in her misery that she doesn’t even look up when Lucy walks in. She simply stares down at the book she clearly isn’t even reading. Lucy wants to talk to her, to explain what happened and assure her that Colin is okay and they’ve almost got this whole mystery figured out, but the words turn into dust in her throat. Instead, she sits down on a couch in a dark corner and waits.
Over the next twenty minutes Dot asks the receptionist to let her see Colin four times, paces the room seven times, sits and stares at her book the rest of the time, but never once does she turn the page.
Dot is tall—some might even describe her as formidable—with surprisingly young skin and hair that has been left alone; silver dominates the deep brown. It’s bundled back in a messy ponytail, exposing her large blue eyes. Even with her striking physical presence, Lucy can tell Dot feels small. Helpless. She’s a mass of constant movement and anxiety.
And then Dot stills. Her hands freeze midway up her thigh as she’s rubbing them worriedly, and she turns to look at Lucy. To her horror, in Dot’s face Lucy sees a mixture of understanding and fear.
“I remember you, you know.” Her soft voice carries a bite of accusation. “You’re the girl I saw in the dining room, covered in dirt.” She lifts a shaking hand and pushes a loose thread of hair behind her ear. “But I remember you from before that too.”
Lucy feels the layers to the statement and looks away before nodding, unable to face the worry and accusation she can see in every line of Dot’s expression.
Many minutes pass before Dot speaks again. “Say your name.”
“Lucy.”
Dot says her name again, and then adds, voice shaking, “Lucia Gray.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Something cold and leaden thunders in Lucy’s limbs, brought on by Dot’s expression: fear. Beneath it, anger.
“You care about him?” Dot asks, leaning forward to get a better look at Lucy in the dim room.
Lucy nods again but turns her eyes to the floor.
“Tell me.”
“I love him.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, finally looking at Dot’s face. “Yes, I care about him. I want him to be safe. I don’t know anything else about what I’m doing here, other than I’m supposed to protect him.”
Humming, Dot closes her book on her lap and stares at the wall. Lucy can feel her unease rise like a curtain between them. “You care about him enough to let him take blankets and resuscitation equipment to the lake?”
“I didn’t ever want anything bad to happen to him,” Lucy begins, but her words ring false with the sound of hospital equipment behind them. “We were trying to figure out how to bring me back.”
“Bring you back?” Dot lets out a confused breath and shakes her head. “I always knew it would catch up with him eventually. Just didn’t think it’d be so soon, or he’d be the one chasing it.”
Before Lucy can ask what she means, the nurse steps into the room with Joe, beckoning to Dot. With one last, lingering glance to where Lucy sits in her stiff chair, Dot leaves her alone in the waiting room.
Lucy waits five minutes before following. She’ll never believe she’s worthy of being Colin’s Guardian. It’s what she should have told Dot. She should have told her she’ll do anything to deserve him and to tell her what that is.
Dot’s in his room now, speaking in soothing tones as Joe walks down to the end of the hall, head down, tired eyes on the shiny linoleum floor as he disappears into the elevator. Lucy perches in a vinyl seat just outside Colin’s door, waiting until she can see him, feel him, apologize.
“Colin,” Dot says, apology thick in her voice. “I met your girl.”
“You met Lucy?” His voice is worse than she could have imagined. Raw and weak.
“Yeah, sweetie.” She’s silent for a beat, and Lucy hears a quiet tapping sound, as if she’s holding his hand and patting it reassuringly. “I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t need to. But I do need you to promise me this is the last time you’re going near that lake.”
The only sound Lucy hears for a long time is the steady beep of his monitors and the garbled voices and laughter from the nurses’ station.
Finally, Colin clears his throat. “Dot.” He sounds like he’s swallowed crushed glass. “I can’t promise that.”
“I knew you’d say that, but I’m afraid I need you to promise anyway.”
“It’s not what you think. I know what I’m doing.”
“I don’t know what to think, baby. All I know is this was no accident. I don’t trust that girl.”
Lucy hears sheets rustle and Colin saying something that sounds like, “Please don’t cry.”
“Are you trying to kill yourself?” Dot asks.
“What? Dot, no. No. I’m trying to help her come back. It’s making a difference, She’s stronger and I—”
“No more, Colin. Because it will kill you. You understand that, don’t you? You’re meant to be here, not there. You can’t bring her back, baby. You aren’t meant to die.”
Lucy feels her heart begin to beat to the rhythm of the monitor in his room. The familiar tick of a clock seems to pulse beneath her skin.
Minutes pass.
Don’t make me leave him. Don’t make me leave him.
She remembers the feeling of his hands on her arms, the soft exhale of his kiss against her shoulder. She’s traced the constellation of freckles across his nose, felt the cold press of his lip ring. She remembers his first tentative touch and his most recent fevered ones.
She’s silently begging him to not let her go. Not to promise, never promise, and hating herself at the same time.
“Okay, okay, Dot. Don’t cry. Please.” He exhales in a quiet, defeated hiss. “I promise I’ll stop.”
The ticking stops and Lucy closes her eyes, feeling like she’s unraveling at the seams.
“I promise I won’t go back into the lake.”
