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The smoke is gone now.
That’s what Lottie notices three days after it happens. She remembers the lesson they had in middle school, when firefighters from the Wiskayok Fire Department came to their class after Stacy Schumacher’s trailer went up in flames from a knocked over candle. She was fine, thankfully, but the entire sixth-grade class had to undergo a fire safety lesson. Lottie had never been so bored.
Regardless, she remembers. Despite the lack of attention and a characteristically twelve-year-old sense of know-all, she remembers that smoke from big fires can stay in the air for days. The bigger the fire, the longer it lingers. The plane was small. Three rotations is all it takes for everything to stop smelling like a barbeque pit.
In the body, however, in the lungs, it can haunt. It’s a spirit on a bannister. It’s a ghost in an attic. It can coat the lobes with a thin film of charcoal, agitate the bronchi for weeks, make the trachea itch and flutter. Lottie has taken to reducing her exhales to keep everything inside of her. It’s the last taste she has of Laura Lee and she doesn’t want to let it go. She staggers her inhales, keeps her heart rate slow, breathes from her nose instead of her mouth. Before, what feels like eons ago, Laura Lee’s perfume had smelled of lavender and honey. There’s nothing sweet left.
The rocks irritate her skin. They push and prod into her upper thighs from where she sits upright and curled into herself. Her knees are pulled tight to her aching chest and her arms are wrapped around them like a seatbelt, keeping them close. The jagged pieces of stone leave little indents like moon craters and they scratch like a cat, streaking red, agitating lines down the backs of her legs.
She hasn’t changed out of her shorts. She hasn’t left the beach. It’s nearing dusk on the third day and there’s still dirt on her knees from where she sank piously into the water. The visceral, simultaneous fault line between girlhood and adulthood is tightroped on the beach’s prickly shore, all without Lottie moving a muscle.
Grief out here was always inevitable, Lottie just didn’t think it would happen to her. She’s not naive enough to believe that she’s immune to rotten things burying inside of her. A bad feeling about the plane had been turning over in her stomach for the better part of a week. Still, a part of her — an innocent part — had hoped. She should have known better; this godless place. She’s struck by just how unfair the world can be, still spinning after tearing someone from its insides.
A feral part of her wants to rip out every tree from the ground, break the world in two, part the earth with her hands and scream until a fissure cracks open in the sky and swallows her whole. A childlike part of her wants to crawl into the lake on her hands and knees and feel what Ophelia had felt, staring up at the stars with the cattails and the lilies against her skin, before sinking underneath it all. Instead, she does nothing. She stares at the water.
Her clothes stink of lake musk from when she had attempted an impromptu rendition of Hamlet, foregoing the stage and sputtering head-first into the water. She made it waist deep before arms entangled her waist like vines and wrenched her backwards, kicking and screaming and gurgling her agony. Shauna and Misty had dragged her back to shore, dropping her on the beach, panting and heaving in their exhaustion. When Lottie had leapt forward again, multiple hands secured around her and fixed her against the rocks. She had felt like a yo-yo, swinging along a vertical plane, someone else determining when she stops and starts.
The girls have stopped checking on her. For a while, especially through that first day, they tugged at her like a child bargaining for the attention of a mother. They tried to drag her like the owner of a reactive dog on the business end of a short leash. She didn’t move. They gave up.
That first night, Jackie had pawed through the undergrowth until she found herself spat out on the beach, illuminated by the swollen moon. She had stood awkwardly next to Lottie before sitting beside her, neither of them speaking.
It’s not going to bring her back, she had said in a crackling, bonfire voice: warm and firm and brutally honest. Lottie hadn’t made a noise, simply rested her chin atop her bruised knees. Jackie left moments later and never returned. The divot in the rocks has since vanished, all proof of her presence evaporated.
Lottie can hear them sometimes, the others, high-pitched and squealing somewhere behind her. Their mourning had lasted until the sun pricked the sky the next dawn. They’re dutifully back to work now, prowling the forest and pawning off their chores onto someone less fortunate. Lottie’s skin is wind-whipped and raw, tender meat beneath a cleaver. Her curved back aches and screams.
She knows there’s nothing left for her here. Everything she loves is waterlogged at the bottom of the lake. Weeds wrap around shrapnel and silt creates a cradle and Lottie is struck by the unfairness of it all, the way it feels as though everything can touch and hold except for her. The air; the water; the earth; the flame — it has all touched more of Laura Lee than Lottie ever will. Her head cracks with anger.
Breaking her statuesque mold — and her fused ligaments — in favor of lying down for the night, Lottie finds herself on her back, a mattress of damp rocks and sand beneath her. She stretches out her legs like a cat and listens to them pop and groan.
Something yawns open inside of her, staring into the night, a wailing mouth crying out for something lost. A piece of her has been torn off, the pain she feels akin to losing a limb or an eye or a few organs, curled up together like Russian nesting dolls in her abdomen. It’s manageable though agonizing. It’s something she won’t think about until she brushes across the scar tissue, the empty socket, the purple stripes of an incision. She misses and she misses and her insides feel wet with the loss. Every movement is a reminder of it.
Her fingers dig into the ground and curl around jagged rocks and small pebbles, nails clawing into the sandy substratum until grit lines the beds. This is the only way she can feel close again; she must be anchored to the earth.
Before her heavy eyes flutter closed, she traces the finite details of Millais’ rendition of the scene in her head, the way he enclosed Ophelia in a shroud of flora before sinking her in the river. She recalls the vibrancy of it all, recollected from her eighth grade art class with a fuzzy slide projected onto the chalkboard. She feels heavy now. There are no poppies around her to signify the end. The world keeps spinning.
_______
It’s the fourth day and she is brought offerings.
Shauna approaches her in the waning light of dawn with a makeshift bindle fisted in her hand, all four corners of a small sheet tight against her fingers. She sits beside Lottie and places the sack in front of her, peeling it open to reveal a canteen of fresh water, black currant, unidentified roots, and a sliver of charred rabbit. Lottie’s traitorous stomach howls.
“I thought you might be hungry,” Shauna offers quietly, avoiding eye contact and staring out into the lapping waves.
“Thanks,” Lottie says, the single word breaking into two sections as the A gets lost in the misuse of her vocal cords. She clears her throat and fingers the black currant, her insides a tangled contradiction. Her mouth waters and her stomach echoes but the thought of food makes her feel lightheaded and unwell. She brings a handful of berries to her lips and forces them past.
They have nothing to say to each other. The silence is awkward but not unnatural. The two of them have always been this way, walking antitheses, a funhouse mirror reflection of the other. It surprises her that Shauna is the one to interrupt her solitude.
“It’s been four days, Lot,” Shauna whispers, so low it’s as if she’s talking to herself.
Lottie remains silent, clenches her jaw indignantly, wraps her arms back around her folded knees as if she’s protecting them from the jolting whiplash of a fender bender. Petrichor fills the air, a fine mist of incoming rain like a hazy film against the sun. She hopes that Shauna will leave soon.
Rather, she continues: “we’re just worried about you, that’s all.”
Lottie sighs. Her eyes lock on to the spot where twisted metal and exposed sinew had smacked the waves with a sickening thud. From that height, hitting water feels like hitting concrete.
“I can’t leave her,” Lottie finally retorts, resting her chin against her knee and relishing in the gentle, prodding ache it brings. She never had a funeral.
“It’s not your fault.”
You don’t have anything to atone for. Stop whipping yourself bloody.
“It is,” Lottie tearfully replies, swallowing stones down the length of her throat. Her anguish is caught in the space just above her clavicle. “I knew something was wrong, I could…I felt it. I knew. And I still let her go.”
Shauna is quiet again for a moment, following Lottie’s pinpoint gaze across the lake. The sun warms their faces and the wind from the incoming storm chills their bones.
“You couldn’t have changed anything,” Shauna says sadly, her cadence one of comfort though she doesn’t reach for Lottie; she keeps her hands firmly to herself. That’s the fascinating thing about grief: no one quite knows how to treat the living.
Lottie shrugs, feeling the bite of her chin digging deeper into her quadriceps with the motion. There’s no way of knowing what could have happened. There’s no way to gather the thread of time and trace it back inch by inch. There is only here and now, in this version of reality where Lottie’s heart is broken and her almost-lover — almost something — sits mangled and shapeless twenty feet underwater.
“Thanks for the food,” she says with a certain finality that is impossible to ignore. Shauna takes the bludgeoning hint in stride.
Lottie is left alone again, the misting weather barreling inbound. It isn’t enough to uproot her from her spot but it is enough to wet her face. It cleanly disguises her tears, she thinks graciously, as if there’s anyone around to think less of her for crying. She lets her eyes redden and fill, the skin taut and aching. When she closes her eyes she sees a million little suns flickering in the dark.
The sudden stillness of the lake is eerie. The waves have stopped bobbing up and down like a lone buoy and the shoreline is clear and moored. Lottie is thankful for the stillness as a gouging thought rips open her insides: a putrefied body will resurface after three days. Aided by moving waves, it will wash ashore within a week — if there’s anything left of it at all. Of her. The thought makes Lottie keel over and retch sourly onto the beach.
She doesn’t eat again.
________
The twilight of the fifth night is lathered in a blue calm. It’s the hour between the wolf and the dog, the sun tucking itself behind the Rockies, the stars littering the vast expanse of sky like little firecrackers. The moon creates a spotlight and Lottie sits on the stage with her skin imprinted with rocks, so dimpled that the undersides of her legs look pockmarked and angry. Her arm hair prickles in the incoming chill and she has become uncomfortably aware of the notches of her spine and the corral of her ribs. Her stomach is caved and hollow beneath her striped t-shirt and the rabbit that Shauna had brought is now cold and inedible. A mystery crustacean had snatched her berries while she slept.
Lottie is in her usual position, rocking herself gently as she rolls a pebble between her forefinger and thumb. She fleetingly thinks that withering away wouldn’t be so bad. There is a time when all bodies descend into nothing, and perhaps the ongoing funeral pews in which she sits will usher her along. Maybe if she was gentle as she went it wouldn’t hurt as much. Maybe if she prayed until her tongue jumbled over psalms in her mouth then the wilderness, satisfied in her display of grief, so sincere it urges forward the calling of a foreign god, would let her see Laura Lee again, if only for a moment. She tosses the stone forward and watches it skitter across the water before sinking with a satisfying ker-plunk.
A heavy rustling from over her left shoulder makes her spine stiffen. She knows there’s bears out here; it was only a matter of time before they caught wind of the humans puttering about the woods. She turns her head to the side with the expectation of coming face to face with matted fur and round, wet eyes, already imagining how two inches of black keratin might feel inside her stomach.
Instead, a figure appears. It looks like nothing more than a silhouette in the darkness, making Lottie squint to decipher it. It looks like a human, standing a little shorter than Lottie, various indistinguishable shapes stacked on top of one another. As it approaches, Lottie can make out the sections of it: the flat plane of a sallow chest, the jutting rock face of distended hips, the tee-like elongation of a neck with a round face on top, hair pulled away and into a knot behind the head. Lottie squints harder as if the brief space between blurriness and blindness will suddenly show a 20/20 picture.
The figure doesn’t stop. It moves with practiced pace, stepping gently along the expanse where pebbled coastline meets detritus littered with broken pine needles and dead leaves. It walks as though it knows this place. Lottie rises stiffly to her feet, wiping the dirt off of the back of her shorts without breaking eye contact with whoever is approaching.
Her heart hammers wildly before flatlining in her chest.
It feels like the wind has been knocked out of her. It feels as though she’s been toppled over, landing with a heavy blow to her back that knocks the sputtering air from her lungs. Her mouth parts in disbelief. She feels diametric and dysregulated, a chill flooding her veins while sweat dews pitifully at her hairline. The wisps at the base of her neck stand at attention while her chest blossoms with heat. She’s frozen to the spot.
There, standing slightly less than fifty yards away, is Laura Lee. She’s nearly unscathed and totally whole, milky skin and hair the color of warm cream. There’s a shock of scar tissue along her forearms from the fire but she’s otherwise okay. She’s alive, and she’s okay. She’s perfect regardless. She’s always been perfect to Lottie.
She’s wearing an uncharred version of her burial clothes: khaki pants and ankle socks, a floral blouse that dips modestly at the chest to show the glinting cross necklace around her neck, a pink cardigan over her bony shoulders. Her shoes are dirty, just as they were before; just as they were when Lottie had teased her about them, the way Laura Lee’s attention to detail and cleanliness had disregarded anything below the knee. Lottie wants every part of the girl clutched in her arms again, so much so that her skin itches with the desperation of it.
The ground crackles as shoes trod across stone and Lottie can’t help but meet Laura Lee halfway. She uses her length to her advantage and nearly bounds across the beach, eyes wide and smile wider. She collapses into Laura Lee like a freight train. She smells just as she did before.
Lottie spends a moment pressed into the shape of Laura Lee, melding her body to the contours, inhaling so deep and so fast she becomes lightheaded. Her arms are steady and so tight that she blushes and relaxes her tensed biceps when she hears Laura Lee’s breath crackle and wheeze with the constriction.
Though she wouldn’t have done it days ago, though it normally would’ve taken her a few stiff drinks for such latent bravery, Lottie sinks into the courage born through reuniting and presses a deep kiss to the space just beneath Laura Lee’s ear, the soft tendon of her neck, feeling the girl shudder in her arms. She nuzzles her nose upwards and inhales the scent of Laura Lee’s hair, falling like a shimmery curtain around her.
There is a humming noise of doubt deep in her stomach, a knowledge that none of this is real, that delirium and exhaustion are fraternal twins. Still, she lets herself believe. For a solitary moment, one free of gut-churning agony, she allows herself to be foolish. She allows herself to be as young and in love as she often forgets that she is.
“I missed you,” Lottie whispers, braving another kiss before laying her forehead against the flat plane of Laura Lee’s shoulder. “I missed you so much.”
She’s crying. She doesn’t realize it right away but the salt dribbles into her mouth like a leaky faucet. She swallows the cotton in her throat and opens her chest, letting the ribs stretch and yawn, crack apart and spill their innards onto the beach. Lottie sobs violently into Laura Lee’s steady embrace, her breath staggered and choppy like someone had cleavered it into tiny sections of relief. Laura Lee holds her through it all.
There are moments when Lottie feels the body beneath her fizzle, the way it would if she were to place her fingers against a buzzing television screen, but she pays it no mind. Instead, she lets herself shatter and piece back together surrounded by lavender and warm hands against her spine. She ignores everything except the thumping heartbeat of someone that she is convinced is profoundly alive.
“I can’t believe it,” she murmurs, finally pulling back with a sniffle, wiping at her eyes with the backs of her hands. She laughs implausibly to herself, a hissing venom in the back of her head reminding her that this moment is physically impossible in every conceivable way. She chooses to ignore it, taking Laura Lee’s scarred hand in her own. “I can’t believe you’re really here.”
Laura Lee smiles kindly, a strand of golden hair falling into her face. Lottie uses her free hand to brush it away and tuck it behind the girl’s ear.
“I came back for you,” Laura Lee finally says, her voice a pleasant humming in Lottie’s ears. It feels like water in the desert and Lottie’s knees shake with it.
“I’m so sorry,” she chokes out, looking down at her feet through the fuzzy kaleidoscope of deep blues that her tears have created in her vision. She digs her toe into the rocks. “I’m so sorry, Laura Lee. It’s all my fault. I should’ve…I should’ve stopped you, I should’ve begged you not to go and I-”
Laura Lee hushes her with a gentle touch, one that sends heat lightning across her skin, setting little fires down her back. A finger crooks beneath her chin and urges upwards, bringing her own eyes to melt into hazy, greyish blue, the color of smoke in the night. She can’t stop staring.
“There was nothing you could have done,” Laura Lee says kindly, says it as if it’s the truth. She says it so convincingly that Lottie almost believes her.
“I could’ve- God, I could’ve tried harder. I could’ve pulled you from the plane and I- I could’ve done more. I should have done more. I’m so sorry.”
Laura Lee smiles, a timid thing that only picks up one corner of her mouth, the thread just shy of reaching her eyes. She drops her hand from under Lottie’s chin and steps closer, into Lottie’s downcast vision, filling every space with herself.
“It isn’t your fault.”
Lottie sobs. “Then whose is it?”
“Fate’s.”
This was always going to happen, Lottie realizes. This was always how it was going to end up. Laura Lee, crucified in saviorhood, soaring above the rest of them, braving the world and trusting its plans for her. Lottie, devoted and unrelenting, knee-deep in the grave and clawing away at the earth with the hopes that she can rotate it backwards just far enough to prevent such bad things happening to good people. There is no other way this could have happened. There is no other world in which it doesn’t. In all of the universes, in all of the versions of this timeline, it all ends the same. Fire and smoke erupts at the same time in every one.
Lottie nods her understanding, pulling Laura Lee’s hand into her own and playing with the delicate fingers, bending them as if to prove they’re real. She wonders how many universes have Laura Lee coming back. How many of them have her returning in one piece? How many believe in her resurrection?
She is struck with sudden exhaustion, the days of fruitless waiting finally coming to an abrupt end. Her eyelids are weighed down and her lashes flutter heavily against her cheeks, raw and dry after so long in the elements. Her limbs are coated in quick-drying cement and she only has a few minutes before she gives in to their inevitable resignation.
“Let’s go home,” she urges firmly, biting at the inside of her bottom lip with fervency as she tugs at Laura Lee’s hand.
Laura Lee is like the stump of a hearty oak, roots digging deep beneath the world and tangling together in a knot. She is an immovable stone and Lottie looks back with a furrowed brow.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, voice still cracking in her recovery from such release.
“I think we should stay on the beach. I don’t belong back there. I’m not here for the others,” Laura Lee says seriously. “I’m only here for you.”
Lottie smiles and pulls again, but once again finds resistance. “They’ll be happy to see you,” she encourages, knowing that none of them will be happier than she is. “C’mon, let me take you back.”
Laura Lee eventually relents and lets herself be led up the beach, her height placing her a few quick steps behind Lottie’s languid ones. Lottie doesn’t look back, simply squeezes Laura Lee’s hand comfortingly as they traverse large stones leading to pebbles, pebbles falling into dirt, dirt giving way to mulch and soggy pine needles and lion’s mane that sprout beside tufts of brackish moss. She follows the well-trekked path cleared by cyclical use, footsteps trodding back and forth as their days in the wilderness go by. It’s a thin, muddy line that leads them right back to the cabin and Lottie walks along it as though she was born to do so, eager to return to a bed after so many nights of jagged rock digging into her tailbone at night — even more so to return with someone to sleep beside her again.
“Lottie,” Laura Lee calls almost desperately, though never letting go, “I’m only here for you. I didn’t come back for them. Not everything is meant to be brought back, it’s okay to let go.”
Lottie, in her fog and deprivation, is confused. She doesn’t know what Laura Lee means. How can things not be meant to be brought back when she holds flesh and blood and a beating heart in her palm? How can unimaginable loss not conjure a silver lining when there are warm fingers tangled in her own, the way they used to be on the floor of the attic and around the fire when everyone else retired for the night? She shakes it from her mind and continues on, nearing the flickering orange light of a roaring fire seeping through the dirty windows of the cabin.
The ferns part for her as if expecting her arrival at the clearing just before the creaking porch steps. There’s a lantern lit and hanging from a nail on one of the wooden braces, an indicator of life and a shining lighthouse in case Lottie’s ship ever decides to return to shore. Today is the day, and she carries her girl in tow.
Lottie’s foot crests the first step and she squeezes Laura Lee’s hand before finally looking back.
Suddenly, the pressure between her fingers is gone. There’s the feeling of fizzling again, a lightning storm, the way the grass stands erect when it’s about to be struck. There’s a soft breath against her palm before there’s nothing at all. She nearly collapses on the porch.
There’s a glimpse of a sad smile before Laura Lee is gone. It’s as if she was never really there, never really in Lottie’s arms again. There’s nothing in front of Lottie except the vast darkness of the forest and a single set of footprints in the dirt. She slowly descends to the step and sits quietly in silence, the type of silence that comes from disbelief, the type that comes from absolute loss.
In her private anguish she realizes, with daunting certainty, that the rest of her life will unfold this way. She will continue to grieve, to mourn, to sew pieces of Laura Lee into the very seams of herself, refusing to part from any of it. She will continue seeing her, feeling her, being followed by what could have been, and she realizes now why even ghosts of those you love the most can haunt so terribly. She realizes now why inevitability and certainty and love can hurt worse than anything that’s livable. She realizes now why Orpheus, knowing the risk, would have always turned around, in every variation of his life.
Lottie can’t help it; she always will too.