Thawed from an ancient glacier, the lake shivers in summer. The sky is white. My mother and I walk together on the beach. We are alone with waves crashing foam beside our feet. Black stamp sand quilts the barren shoreline as far as we can see.

We came here once when I was a child. This is where she told me the story of Celine.

“When I was young, a girl drowned in this lake,” she had said. She rubbed sunscreen onto my thin shoulders while I faced the horizon. “She was five years old, the same age as you. Her mother and aunts were on the beach, but they couldn’t save her. Her mother saw her, above the water one moment and gone the next. She went after her, but Celine was gone.”

“From here you can’t see them,” she said, “but beneath the surface hide cross currents and undertows. Do not go deeper than your waist. Do not go past the point where you can hear me. If I yell, you answer, so I know you’re not out too far. If you do not answer, I will swim and drag you out of the water. You will be sorry if I have to pull you back onto this beach. Undertow is serious. If the undertow gets you, you drown. You die and your body never comes out of the lake. You are gone.”

My mother held my shoulders and turned me around so I faced her. Wind off the lake slapped my back and scraped hair into my face. I clawed the strands from my mouth and eyes.

“Look at me,” she said.

I shoved hair behind my ears and squinted at her. She leaned her face close to mine.

“Do you know what happens when a person drowns?”

I shook my head. My hands clasped one another tightly in my lap.

“Imagine holding your breath. After a minute or so, your lungs contract and force you to open your mouth and breathe. When you’re drowning, your lungs try to breathe, but instead of air, water surrounds you. No matter how hard you try not to breathe, your lungs breathe the water. Your lungs are meant only for holding air. When they fill with water, the tissue bleeds and tears into pieces.”

“When the current gets you, it takes you far from shore. The current hides in regular waves, so you don’t feel it working on you. When the current is in the water, the waves feel normal, gently rocking you back and forth. It is an illusion, because the current pulls you forward into the center of the lake and never returns you to the shore. You don’t know the current has you until you look back and see the beach far behind you, but by then it is too
late for you to swim back. No one can swim against the current. The only way to save you would be if we had a boat and then only if we can reach you before the undertow.”

“The undertow can get you even when your feet are touching the bottom. Where the water is deeper, the undertow is more powerful. Once the current has you, the undertow can take you easily. The undertow comes from the very bottom, the deepest point in the lake’s center. It travels under the surface throughout all the water, searching for things it can grab to pull down to the bottom of the lake. There, the cold and weight of water forms
pressure that keeps anything from leaving. Undertow collects everything it finds in this place and no force can remove them.”

“The current wants to bring you to the center of the lake. The undertow wants to take you the deepest bottom of the lake, where no one alive can ever go, and from which nothing returns. If the current takes you, there’s a chance we can get you back. If the undertow takes you, you will be gone forever. We will never find your body.”

Goosebumps sprang up across my back. “Where will my body go?” I asked.

“No one knows where your body goes,” my mother said. “Either fish eat you or your body rots and breaks into pieces and then fish eat you. Maybe fish don’t eat you and you rot alone. Your bones fill with water, become heavy, and fall to mingle with rocks and weeds. Maybe your body washes up on the beach next spring, after you have decayed, frozen, thawed, and decayed more.
Sometimes in the spring they find bodies of people who fell through the ice in the winter. The bodies are black and oily as tar. All of your cells bloat. Your skin splits from the pressure of lake water inside. When they drag out corpses after a few weeks in the lake, they move the body gently. If they pull or press on part of you too hard, that piece breaks off. You could be lying on the beach and appear intact, but nothing holds you together. Lake water fills your bones, muscles, and skin to make it all the same. Many times, a body washes ashore and men pick it up, forgetting to support the head. The neck snaps and the person’s head falls off and rolls down the beach.”

My fists clenched and trembled. “Do they bring back the head?” I whispered.

“Yes, but that doesn’t matter when you’re dead.”

“Was it the undertow or the current that took the girl?”

“Celine,” my mother sighed. She took my fists and smoothed them open in her palms. She smiled sadly. “The current and the undertow together joined to take Celine. That is why her body never returned.”

I stared at her a moment longer. She looked to the horizon and told me again to be careful. I stood and faced the lake. Stamp sand pierced my feet.

A lifetime later, my mother and I have grown old on the same shore. We walk the beach together and collect pebbles of soft glass washed in by waves. Held against sunlight, they are clouded, never clear. Sometimes they are root brown, pond green, or blue. Locked within some droplets, behind the clouds, lay sections of steel wire webs. Fused within glass, the wire is untarnished, so despite decades in the water, three small silver coils gleam in every joint where two wires twist together.

Celine stopped here on a long-ago summer day. Perfect and preserved, she remains a child, ghosting white on the black sand bottom of the lake.

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