Lake Talk

Q is reading over one of their conversations. She and Jane, her mother, spoke once in writing about a blue lake, a greenish blue lake. They spoke of its depth and what it felt like to swim in it.
Years later, in an orange November, they saw a tree burn. Or smoke. They saw that, too, how small it all was as it was happening. Everyone in the parquet gathered around and watched as a live tree, smoking, began to burn, to wither. Some camaraderie was happening around the tree; a few of the onlookers headed toward the main strip. A woman in purple invited them, too, after asking how long they had been there, watching. They stuck around until the park was empty and the charred tree lost its heat. Leafless.
Mother Jane and daughter Q walked home after a while, the long way, in silence. Three red lights and a thin shadow of the crane, disappeared into the cloudy night.
That year, she was unsteady between her chair and the microwave, between her room and the bathroom, between the porch swing and the front door. Q saw her in these places. The radio was always on around Jane, loud and unforgiving. She listened carefully to it as she shook.
The playground next to the burning tree was still dangerous. Orange metal and chains strung from end to end. To climb, a purple plastic tiered system. Pavement underneath and wooden countertops for exchanges. As a child, Q had exchanged something there, once, maybe sand. Little Q hoped for expertise there. Then, years later, her hobbling mom wandered through it, old, leaning on it all, disappearing into the dusk. Q wished for her to sit.
“I want to be close to smell it all,” she said, resisting.

She still knows the color of Jane’s hand veins as her fingers reached out toward her that evening. It is hers to keep. Q closes her eyes now, cold. Her hair is standing on end. She knows for certain everything about those hands in the dusky light, the wedding rings on a swollen pinky finger. Several identical stones in a cluster, turning color and swelling, too, as the sun disappeared and a night breeze blew in. Frail mother, Jane, held and hobbled, and Q pointed out everything in front of them. They reeked of tree smoke, disappeared around a corner.
“Don’t tell me where the sidewalk ends,” Jane said to Q, eyes closed, smiling. “Tell it where I’m going.”
Q checked the newspapers for weeks after the event. A big burn, but it was never written about. Q walked through many parks, half-hoping to see it happen again, to discover something. Still. Once, Q considered lighting one herself, late when she was out with the new dog with a heavy lighter in her pocket. The dog, a little, golden thing with crusted eyes and a pink tongue, slept in the bathroom. Stank in the kitchen and licked dirty plates as they loaded the dishwasher.
The old dog loved snow. Winter afternoons, as a child, Q in the backseat shouting out the window. Jane with the heat on, driving slowly up the street with the passenger door open, calling to the dog, their puppy, as he wove in and out of frozen yards, bursting through morning stillness.
Her mother, a thick piece of cold ham flapping in her hand, the wind. The accidental smells of Q’s life.
The new dog, an enemy of Q’s for many years. Dead on the treadmill in December after a wet snow, also burned –– dust in a box. On Christmas Eve. It must have been his sort of funeral that day. Her brother’s coarse eyebrows were beginning to turn gray, and Q noticed, through his dog tears, everything about him. Him, on the staircase, made the banister strange. Later, crouching into the fridge for absent cans, fat and puzzling to her in his cheap, black suit. Q knew then, as he knocked around among leftovers with dry red hands, that she would never hear that sweet kid nickname for her again, never think of it.
How once, he jumped head-first into a deep swimming hole. Q treaded there, below, calling out. 
That year, they went to C’s for Christmas dinner. Dead lavender lined the table. They all touched hands and clinked and ate potatoes and cold pieces of turkey that smelled like Saran Wrap and heat and tasted like nothing. Christmas was the same, but the dog was dead, and C was close to falling.
Home, the shed was glowing when Q and Jane pulled in. Jane, heartbroken on the pavement, feeling childless.
In Jane’s gentle touches of picture frames in empty rooms and sweet little breaths at the bookshelf, Q saw how she longed to share the kitchen table with them once more, do it again –– differently and louder. Jane in the room over as Q held her breath with an ear against the wall.
“Over here, do you remember when he fell?” Jane pointed to the spot she stood on. Q smiled.
In the bathroom mirror, Q pressed against the reflection of herself and clutched her stomach. The old shampoo bottles, beautiful things with dark and sturdy caps, were her only comfort in this room. How she hid, how she longed to hide forever, in that shower stall as a child, when the cousins came, and they all played. She never discovered who used the long wooden bath brush. Yellow bristled, hanging from the shower-head, that she never touched. Perhaps she could have touched it. It, and the bottles, her company, her hiding family. A holiday made the house a new and strange maze. Cousins who stuck her in the dryer, small and fearless.
Q always was small and fearless. A fresh piece of earth that had landed in her siblings’ adolescent laps, to be folded and tossed. Q, the youngest child, in the metallic dark, begging out loud in a quiet prayer to be found. Later, little Q with clean braids crouched behind an armchair, hiding from them all, penetrated by a fear that reeked of biscuits and carpet and the empty peanut shells littering the yard. Promising to be small behind the green armchair. Q was, once, stroking the back of that chair, feeling its spine, its bars, as the heat blew up her pajamas bottoms and made her little stomach warm.
Her mother’s legs and knees were swollen that year, and it worsened in January. Jane watched Q notice, often. Jane pulled blankets over herself in the car and at home, even at the dinner table. Embarrassed, Jane never looked at her own legs in the shower.
“A life lived underneath a blanket is a hot one,” Jane said once, softly, as Q watched her sweat in front of the television. 
When the coldest part of winter came, Jane was relieved and happily disappeared underneath a fat checkered quilt that she had stuffed with down when Q was a child. Jane opened her window, its screen, and let snow blow in onto her hot cheek.
At January’s end, Q found her, once, asleep with a fleck of ice on her red, right cheek, melting. And soon after, Q left, and Jane lived alone for some time.
“The dogwood is dying,” she said on the phone that spring. “Come see its last bloom.”
Q stayed for three weeks and watched the flowers turn from pink to brown and then fall. Four beautiful petals on each flower. Jane stayed out in the yard late into the night, walking in and out of the little gate. They spoke very little those weeks. Q cooked pasta. Jane zipped herself into pink fleece and ate at a desk moved out underneath the dogwood tree. Q watched from the kitchen sink, where she always looked and ate.
Q was taping it all together back then. Both of them so small and messy. Like a slow problem. Like a hole. She would go out and gather her mother’s dishes then help her inside to the little cot she liked to sleep on.
Jane asked Q to call the company that would cut the tree and take it away. After collecting the last few flowers, she did. Jane stood on the deck and watched.
“A four-season beauty,” she whispered when saws began.
They had a new stump.
When Jane was still alive, it was June, and when she died, June hurried to an end, to July. As Q and her siblings sorted out the house, she began calling her mother “Strangewoman” in her head. For the things they found, their order, had a human touch she could not recognize.

The lake in question she now finds colorless. Q and Jane wrote about it once in a quiet café on the edge of a town not too far from the lake itself. Jane’s blue script looping around Q’s markings. The page is all that is left of mother and daughter, together, their voices intermingling. She discovered it inside of Jane’s jewelry box. Underneath piles of bracelets and heavy earrings that belonged to women she had never known, the paper rough where it had pressed against the velvet.
She takes her car and drives up to see the lake. Up like everyone was always driving, where they had driven, to see the old, black lake in its night shell.
To park the car and be motherless is horrible. The lights come on for a moment, and everything is pale and empty and clicking.
On the dark shore, Q sees a few lights in the distance and the water laps, softly on the sand. Q sees blackness and width and recognizes everything. Here, she thinks, is my end, my only place.
Strangewoman. Her piles of unopened toothbrushes for years that never came. Her inability to fold and be soft. Her parking tickets stuffed beneath the rug. Q closes her eyes and wraps herself up in a blanket. Years of nights with ears pressed against a wall.
Now, a cool summer night with wind cracking in the distance and a long drive ahead of her. Low hanging shadows crowding the muddy shore.
Loud Q, on a night beach, reciting the words of her new life: “My mother, able to hold more rainwater, always got more rain.”

ξ

Emily Mernin was born in New Jersey. She currently lives in Brooklyn.