PART
ONE
I
successfully ran away from home for the first time when I was twelve years
old.
I
suppose every kid tries to run away from home at some point in their
childhood. I had made previous
attempts.
When I was five, one evening I plotted
an escape with my favorite teddy bear, a stuffed animal named Ralph who was so
threadbare my mother had sewn his stuffing entrails back into him numerous
times; she had also patched up his bottom where the neighbor’s dog had taken a
chunk out of him trying to rip him from my shrieking, four-year-old grip. I wrapped Ralph up in my blankie and sneaked
into the kitchen while Ma and Daddy were watching TV in the living room in the
dark. I still remember the narrow
rectangle of light the refrigerator spilled onto the linoleum as I cracked the
door open ever so slightly. I remember
how anxious that line of light made me as my young self realized I hadn’t
planned this well enough, and that line of light was going to get me caught.
Just as vividly, I remember the relief I felt shimmying through my body
when I saw that Ma and Dad hadn’t noticed the fridge light at all. I heard Ma’s soft laughter in the living
room; perhaps they were watching a comedy.
Very quietly, I pulled out three
grape-flavored juice boxes (they were my favorites) and carefully tucked them into
the blankie with Ralph. Hugging the
bundle closely to my stomach, hoping desperately not to drop it and spill my
reserves loudly onto the floor exposing my presence, I tiptoed out to the
garage door and very slowly opened it and slipped through. I knew the big garage door would be open,
because my big brother Marty wasn’t home from his after-school job yet; Daddy
always left the garage door open and the driveway light on until sixteen-year-old
Marty got home from the Safe-n-Saver where he worked then as a bag boy.
Five-year-old me made it all the way
to the end of the driveway in my Disney Princess nightgown and fuzzy pink
slippers before my hands began to clam up, and I began to worry that three
juice boxes might not be enough to make it for very long, and I began to wonder
if I would never see Ma and Daddy again if I ran away, and that seemed like a
lot to take in. I returned to the house,
put away the juice boxes, and put myself to bed. No one knew I had even left the house.
When I was ten, I again tried to
make a break for it. Ma and Daddy were
fighting a lot by that time over finances and future plans and a bunch of other
things I was too young then to understand but now believe had something to do with
sex. The worst time for me was after I
had been tucked-in and was lying in my pink-and-green-flowered canopy bed
trying to drift off to sleep. During the
afternoons when Ma and Daddy fought, I could drown out the noise by focusing
hard on my homework or going over to our next-door neighbor’s house (the old
couple with the mean dog had moved out a couple of years prior, making way for
a nice family with a daughter my age named Martha). When Ma and Daddy yelled in the evenings, I
could barely hear them over my own laughing as I watched my favorite television
shows, or over the squeaking of the trampoline springs as I jumped for hours in
the backyard. But at night, when the
whole neighborhood seemed to have gone to sleep, and it was just Ralph and me
cuddled up in the dark, the sound of Ma and Daddy arguing sounded like fingernails
running down a chalkboard and felt like that pain in your chest when some bully
dunks you underwater in the neighborhood swimming pool and holds you there even
as you flail your arms and kick him.
So Ralph and I prepared for a get-a-way,
again at night. This time I planned
things a little better. I waited until
my parents had finally yelled themselves to sleep, Ma on the couch in the den
and Daddy at the kitchen table, slumped over a heaping pile of bills. Slowly,
quietly, carefully, I packed myself a lunch box with all of my favorites: two
grape juice boxes, one peanut butter and jelly sandwich (grape jelly, of
course), a carton of milk, a box of animal crackers, and a banana. I also snatched a twenty from dad’s bedside
table; I knew it was there, because I had seen him put it there after
retracting it from my brother Marty for taking his girlfriend out in Daddy’s
car without asking (but also, I think, for still living at home and still
working at the Safe-n-Saver and smoking a lot of pot at age twenty-one). I felt a little guilty about taking the
twenty, especially since money seemed to be the cause of a lot of Ma and
Daddy’s fights, but I had to be practical.
My poor planning before would have really cost me, had I made it past
the driveway.
This time, I made it almost all the way
out of our neighborhood, but a man who lived in the house at the entrance and
worked with Daddy recognized me, apprehended me, and returned me to my very
sleepy, very worn, very angry parents.
The same twenty was retracted from me, also.
But by the time I was twelve, I’d given
my escape strategy a lot more thought.
Daddy had run away from home himself the year before, but he had plenty
of twenties and a car, so he got a lot further than I had. Ma didn’t do anything anymore except watch
soap operas and game shows and smoke cigarettes. I believe that soft laughter coming from the
living room as five-year-old me opened the refrigerator in the dark was the
last sound of happiness I ever heard from her.
Marty had finally moved out. He’d knocked up the girl he had taken out in
Daddy’s car without permission, so he had to marry her and get a real job and
stop smoking so much pot. He quit
working at the Safe-n-Saver grocery and took up residence as a bank teller. What a life, surrounded by twenties, all day
long (but snatch one of those, and it’s the big house for you). With Marty and Daddy gone, watching Ma smoke
herself to death on the couch had become too much to bear.
So one day after school I took my
allowance on my bike into town and bought a small fold-up camping tent at
Walmart. I brought the tent back home
and hid it under my no-longer-canopy bed, still in the box. The next morning at school, I invited Martha
to come with me. “We’ll be renegades,” I
promised her. “Fancy free, like in the
movies.”
“But I like my family,” Martha replied.
I hated her guts until lunch. We always ate together outside at the picnic
table under the biggest oak, farthest away from the building. She met me there with her brown bag, plopped
down next to me, and sighed. “Okay, my
sister just got a greasy boyfriend who wears all black and looks like an
elf. I just saw them together, and it
made me sick. I’ll run away with
you.” I gave her a hug, and I loved her
again.
After school that afternoon, Martha came
over to my house. She brought a giant
yellow duffle bag full of clothes and shoes and books. “What do you need all those clothes
for?” I asked. “We’ll be on our own in the woods. No one will care if we wear the same three
outfits over and over. It’ll be
great! All those clothes and shoes will
only weigh you down.” Martha consented
to giving up some of the clothes and shoes, but I let her keep the books
because, well, books are marvelous and always necessary.
Martha helped me pack my own bag, and when
I was certain my mother was passed out on the couch in front of the TV, Martha
and I sneaked downstairs and into the kitchen where we poured water into our
matching pink lunch thermoses we had bought together at school a year ago. We packed lunch boxes again, and this time I
stole a whole fifty from Ma’s purse (if it helps, I do regret it now). The image of Ma sprawled out on the couch in
the den as Martha and I were leaving will be imprinted on my mind always:
skinny, fragile, sickly-looking, tired and heavy breathing a low rumble, a
simmering cigarette propped upright in her half-open hole of a mouth. Before going out the door, I quickly turned
on my heel and ran over to the couch where I removed the dangerous burning
cigarette from Ma’s mouth, snubbed it out in the ashtray on the coffee table,
and draped a throw-blanket over Ma’s body.
“Good-bye, Ma,” I whispered, and then I quickly followed Martha out into
the night.
PART
TWO
I
go back to that spot in the woods where Martha and I made camp often, these
days. It’s truthfully the only place I
feel quite at home, as sad as that may sound.
I went back there on Martha’s eighteenth
birthday, to fill myself with her presence and all the pleasant memories
attached to her. Thinking about Martha
brings on a flood of memories from jumping contests on the trampoline, to tea
parties in my bedroom, to looking at our middle school yearbooks and giggling
over the cutest boys, and the most annoying ones. I don’t ever want to lose any part of Martha,
even the small window of time I hated her back when she told me she wouldn’t
run away with me because she liked her family.
When I went there on her birthday, I
wasn’t expecting anyone else to be there.
No one went to that spot anymore; it’s as if the accident had tainted it
for everyone else. I don’t know if many
people had camped out in that little clearing by the lake before what happened
to me, but I know they certainly did not after they read about it in the
papers.
But on Martha’s birthday, there was
a small cluster of tents set up around a campfire burning brightly in the
night. Curious, I crept towards it and
listened in on the conversation taking place around the campfire. I couldn’t see anyone from where I was, but I
could hear voices and make out vaguely-human shadows cast on the tents circled
around the fire. The voices sounded
young, like kids.
I crept forward more until I could
make out the people sitting on sleeping bags around the blazing fire. They were teenagers, probably
high-schoolers. I didn’t recognize any
of them. I wondered if I had known any of
them from before and over the years had just…forgotten. I was standing behind an orange tent looking
on and listening when I heard a familiar voice pipe up from directly in front
of that tent, only feet away from me: “…Yeah, but I told you I didn’t want to
have my birthday out here.”
I gasped. Was it…could it be?
“I know, but we really thought it
would be good for you,” a girl from across the circle said soothingly, a
brunette with freckles.
“Yeah, therapeutic and shit,” a
red-headed boy added, ever so tastefully.
“But you’re right, Martha, we
shouldn’t have drug you here anyway, no matter how much we thought it would
help you,” a handsome dark-haired boy said from beside the person who was
hidden from me by the orange tent. My
breath caught in my throat as I hurried around the tent to see who was sitting
there…gasp! Yes! It was her!
My dear Martha, a beautiful grown-up version of herself, still with long
blonde hair, though instead of twisting into two braids that hung down her
front, it was free and wavy and flowing down her back. I hadn’t seen her since the accident; I hadn’t
seen anyone from my life. It would have
been too hard to stay away, I believed.
Instead, I had spent the last six years wandering around to different
spots I had gone to as a kid: the fishing hole, the Safe-n-Saver, the bike
paths, this spot in the woods….
“It’s just so creepy out here,”
Martha said with a shiver. The handsome
dark-haired boy put his arms around her.
“It’s like she’s…still here,
or something.”
A magnetic pull wrenched me forward,
as if my soul desired to go to her against my own will. But I stood my ground, forcefully. No,
I told my shaking self, that would do no
good. I could think of no greater
rejection than to run to my best friend whom I hadn’t seen in six years and not
be greeted with so much as eye contact, which I knew would be the dire
case.
The dark-haired boy glanced around
the circle of glowing campfire faces, and a few of them nodded. He looked back to Martha. “Would you like to…talk about her?”
“No,” Martha said quickly.
My soul shivered.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want
to,” the freckled brunette girl went on, “but we all think it might be good for
you. We know you were close to her,
but…but you’ve never really talked about what happened. We thought bringing you here might finally
give you closure.”
“I don’t want closure,” Martha said
weakly, looking up with tears in her eyes that sparkled like sapphires in the
light of the fire.
I would have cried too if I still
had tear ducts.
“She was my best friend,” Martha
said softly. “I am…reluctant to let her
go.”
None of the others said anything,
but their faces urged her to go on, because they all knew she really needed to
let me go. I could tell Martha knew it
too. She heaved a sigh before saying,
“She lived next door to me. She was very
unhappy. Her family was…weird. Her parents had never gotten along, at least
not since I had known them, and her brother was…just a deadbeat, really. He was kind of cute though.” Martha laughed and blushed a little with this
admission. “I never told her, but I had
a bit of a crush on her deadbeat brother.”
I knew that.
“To tell the truth, I was always a
little bit jealous of her, as much as I loved her. She had this sucky situation, and she wasn’t
happy, but she was still…fiery and innovative, sort of like a candle resistant
to being blown out. I always wished I
could be that strong.”
I did not know that.
“Anyway, we ran away from home one
night, like a lot of twelve-year-old kids do,” Martha went on, her voice
getting colder. “As usual, she had
thought of everything; we packed a tent, some clothes, some books, a couple of
lunch boxes, a flashlight…” she laughed.
“Boy, we believed we had thought of everything.” The dark-haired boy squeezed her
shoulder. Martha kept talking. “So, we set up the tent and crawled inside
with the flashlight, and we giggled like silly girls having a sleepover and
talked about our next big life plans as we ate our peanut butter sandwiches and
sipped our juice boxes. She said she was
going to join the circus someday, and I remember thinking that would have been
the perfect job for her! Then she could
have a new sort of family, a family of circus freaks to travel around with from
town to town with no deadbeat brother, no distant mother, no cheating
father…you know? I don’t know, that’s
just what I remember thinking then.”
Martha’s eyes looked glassy-gray now as she stared hard into the dancing
orange flames. “And then, we decided to
go down and see the lake. It was very
dark, but we brought the flashlight and used it to swat the tall grass and
weeds out of the way as we went. When we
got to the edge of the lake, I leaned out over it, trying stupidly to see my
reflection in it. I didn’t see anything,
of course. The lake was as it is now,
murky dirty brown, and again, as it is now, this clearing is not quite clear
enough to let in enough moonlight for a reflection. But in leaning over the lake, I lost my
balance, stepped back quickly, and dropped the flashlight into the lake. It bobbed for a few seconds on the surface,
and then the batteries weighted it enough to sink.”
I stepped closer towards Martha
reluctantly. I wanted to see her more
clearly, really see her for the last
time. I lowered myself down in front of
her, between her and the fire, so that we were almost touching noses, if I had one
anymore.
Martha suddenly stopped telling her
story and cocked her head to one side slightly, like a confused dog. She blinked hard once and stared directly at
me. For a moment, I felt her really looking at me, but then it was gone and
she shook her head and continued telling her story to the group gathered around
her. “Anyway, I couldn’t swim, but she
could. She told me to step back while
she dove in after the flashlight. I
should have told her to forget it. I
should have told her we could make our way back to the highway without a
flashlight much easier than she could find it in the murky, dark, cold
water. But surprise and fear in the
darkness kept my mouth shut, and she was in the water before I even realized
how truly dangerous it could be. And
then suddenly, my mind jerked an old memory to the surface forcefully: I was a
little girl, probably five or six, when we lived in our old house on the other
side of these woods, and my dad had read a story in the paper about a little
boy who had gotten bitten twice by a very poisonous snake by this lake. The boy was rushed to the hospital, and he
survived, though he came frighteningly close to death before he recovered. ‘Don’t ever go down to that lake alone, girls,’
my dad had told my sister and me then.
She was already in the water, but this
memory seared me like a fire-poker, and I started screaming. I saw her head bob up out of the water, at
least I think it was her head, it was very very
dark, and I just kept screaming and screaming. In my head, I was saying Get out of the water, get out of there, there are snakes in there, get
out get out get out, but I know that aloud it just came out as very shrill
shrieks of terror. Though it was
maddeningly dark, I did see the white flicker of its head surface, the one that
got her….”
I could feel myself backing away
from Martha slowly, though I didn’t want to go.
No, I whispered into the warm
night air, just a few more minutes with
her, just a few more minutes before I go….
“Still screaming, I turned around
and ran. I couldn’t see where I was
going, and I hardly cared, as long as I could somehow get back to civilization
and tell someone, anyone, that there was a poor girl stuck in a lake of
snakes. I did, finally, but it was too
late.”
I felt all warm and watery then, as
though I was evaporating. The sensation
was a nice one, kind of like resurfacing from a good, refreshing dunk in the
swimming pool.
“They searched the rest of the night
and found her body early the next morning, bloated and floating half-submerged
in the middle of the lake. I didn’t see
her body (the funeral was closed-casket), but I still have this horrible mental
image left in my head when I was told that they found her like that. Sort of like the old lady in the bathtub in The Shining, or something…just morbid
and awful and a reminder.”
I was getting warmer and more
watery, and I was beginning to feel something closer to happiness than I had
ever glimpsed before. Was I smiling as I
drifted away? Yes, I think so.
“And that’s that,” Martha was saying
below, her voice growing fainter as I floated up and up and up… “You were right,
guys. Surprisingly, I do feel a little better having talked
about her, freer somehow, as if a weight was just lifted from my
shoulders….”
I was so far up now that the people
below were just a circle of ants, and the tents were their mounded
anthills. The lake was a shimmery black
hole down there, less water and more space, just an empty void I no longer
filled.
I kept floating up and up and up,
and as I did, the happiness spread larger and the black lake-hole kept
shrinking and shrinking. And all of the
sky was soft and welcoming as she let me go, and I let her go, at last. I was finally high enough to see the stars,
which on a night as lovely as this one looked less like stars and more like the
twinkling, happy lights around the circus ring.
Step right up! Ladies and
gentlemen, a spectacle like this you have yet to behold…introducing, the one,
the only, Lady of the Lake, a sensational performer indeed, a candle forever
resistant to being blown out.
- Lindsay
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