The house in the woods by the lake was always cold, even though we only ever went in the dead of summer.
This was the ninth year of our annual weekend at the house and, like all traditions, it had gone from a novelty to an obligation. It started the summer after college, when we went after graduation. We felt so adult. Calvin and I, Percy and Eric, and terminally alone Tim. We drank too much and woke up late and went for long, rambling walks in the woods. Afternoons were sunlight and humidity and glass pitchers of vodka and lemonade, mosquitos darting through badminton games while Eric shouted about the shuttlecock.
Then, two years ago, Tim brought Charlotte.
Two years later, pulling into the house, i can tell we’re the last ones. Eric and Percy’s car was already there with its old Why Choose the Lesser of Two Evils? Cthulhu 2016 bumper sticker. So was Tim’s black Honda. We parked and Calvin grabbed our bags and we walked in. Music blared from a smart speaker, an old song playing because now we were old, over thirty, and the songs that used to be brand new now sounded like fossils, like what people listened to in the dawn of time. Brittany was singing, telling me to work, bitch. Poor Brittany. She thought she was going to get to be Madonna and instead she wound up as Elvis. You don’t always get to choose.
Calvin put our stuff in their room while I said hi to Percy and Eric. I didn’t even have to ask where Tim was, as Percy nodding to the back porch with an exaggerated expression of sadness.
I opened the door and saw him, tan and thin, his back to the house, staring out at the woods. I cleared my throat and he turned away, said hi and we hugged, sort a few minutes chatting. When I said I was going to go back inside he asked me to wait and then began talking, quietly and clearly.
“Hey,” he said, “I wanted to thank you again for everything you did. It’s been really hard these last few months. I keep thinking about her.”
“I’m sure,” i nodded and tried to look understanding but i worried I looked as uncomfortable as i felt.
“You really helped, you know? There wasn’t anything else you could have done.”
“Same with you,” I said and he shook his head, ran his hand through his hair.
“I guess so, huh?”
We both stopped talking and looked out at the woods. I didn’t look at the lake.
*********
That night, in the room that faced the lake, listening to the sounds of the house, I didn’t sleep. I thought about Charlotte. I thought about all the things i had seen and wished I hadn’t.
I thought of that night when I woke up in the old house. Calvin was snoring, maybe that was what woke me. Then I heard it. Hushed voices from one of the rooms. I got up and padded out into the kitchen, saw the thin trails of light seeping out of Tim’s door. He has company, I wondered. Where had he met a girl out here, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night?
Back then I was still smoking so I went outside to have a cigarette. The moon was bright, the air alive in that way the world feels so much more alive in the wild, the feral evening. Then I saw it. Wet footprints onto the porch.
*******
There years later we were back at the lake house. next day at the house, Calvin and I sitting on the couch. He leaned over and asked me in a low whisper if I thought l Tim was ok.
“I’m sure he is,” i said. We were across the room from him, talking quietly, watching him dump sugar into his coffee.
“This is the first time back to the cabin since Charlotte died,” he said.
“I know.”
“Isn’t it a little weird he came.” Calvin crossed his legs and leaned forward, turning slightly toward me. “I mean, how long has she been dead?”
“You can’t live in the past. You have to keep going.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “But if I die before you, please take a little longer in the mourning period, ok?”
“Stop it,” I poke him in the ribs and he chuckles. I can’t stop staring at Tim. “That won’t happen. But no matter what, I think you have to give the past up, or it can pull you back in.”
*****
Tim refused to tell anyone how he and Charlotte met so one afternoon, when the boys were on a beer run, i cornered her and made her tell.
“It was the poetry section at Kramer’s,” Charlotte said. “We both reached for the same copy of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock.””
“I didn’t know Tim read poetry,” i said.
“He doesn’t,” she laughed. “He was just trying to pick me up. He bought the book though. He loves it, says it’s so romantic.”
“It isn’t romantic at all,” i said. I think I was on my third drink. “It’s a modern dissection of Romanticism. Life isn’t grand and wonderful, it’s about aging and dying. Even the mermaids can’t love him.”
“Well,” Charlotte smiled, “He doesn’t quite think it’s that at all.”
******
When Charlotte got sick, everyone knew she would get better. She was young. She was pretty. She was funny. She had dyed green hair. People with dyed green hair don’t die.
But she got sicker.
At first, that just seemed to fit the narrative as well. She wasn’t going to actually die, or anything. This was just to establish tension until she was fine and then they could all talk about it, reminisce over how she made it.
Instead , she kept getting worse. She was in and out of the hospital. She was falling in the shower. The doctors were discussing getting a nurse, or moving her into rehab. Or hospice. The stories seemed to depend upon what Tim said, and he didn’t always say the same thing.
No one else noticed the inconsistencies. No one else caught the little holes in his stories.
Nobody but me.
I noticed because almost every day, she was at the apartment. I helped Charlotte out of bed. I bought them groceries. I added up the missing facts in the health care narrative until i came to a worrisome conclusion.
I didn’t tell anyone i thought Charlotte was faking, even Calvin. I planned instead to wait until Tim was at work and I was there helping out. That’s when I would ask Charlotte myself.
Charlotte looked awful that day. Thin, pale, faded. I thought about those weird faking cancer cases and how they always looked bad too. After breakfast, when I tried to broach the subject, Charlotte looked at me from the couch. So tired and sad.
“Do you think I’m faking?” She was breathing heavily. I thought it was because of how damp the apartment was — Tim had four humidifiers running in the living room. He said the doctor told him to do it. Moist air was the best thing for her condition.
“I’m not saying you’re faking. I think something’s wrong. I’ve seen the way you look–” i gestured at the girl’s ragged body, “I know something’s wrong.”
“Do you want to know, then?”
She leaned up and put her pointy elbows on the table. “Do you really want to know what’s wrong?”
“Yeah. Tell me. I want to know.”
Charlotte’s eyes seemed to glow and I felt like when i said wanted to know more, I had opened some sort of terrible doorway, some awful passage to a place I didn’t want to know about. I didn’t want to know it existed. I had fucked up, and now I was doomed.
“Remember how I told you Tim and I met? In the bookstore?” Charlotte sat up from her lying down position on the couch. She pulled her soft blue green blanket the color of the sea down around her shoulders. Something about her complexion, her hair, the blanket, the humidity of the room, she looked underwater.
“Yeah.” I hated how shaky my voice sounded.
“That was a lie. I didn’t met him there.” Charlotte said
“So, where did you met him?” I touched my forehead and wiped away sweat. The humidifiers, I thought. Surely that was it. .
“I watched him.” She smiled. A sick smile that spread across her face. “I’ve watched a lot of men. But he was different. And I used to be different too.”
She talked and all around her the humidifiers pumped out thick clouds of steam.
******
Charlotte died three weeks after that conversation. No funeral, explained Tim. She didn’t want people crying and talking about her. This life, she had said, hadn’t worked out for her. Time to try and see if she could do something else.
The trip was only two months later and they were going to cancel but Tim said Charlotte would have thought that was a terrible idea. It was a tradition. You need to follow traditions. So he kept the trip.
*****
The first day felt like the funeral we had never had for her. Everyone told stories. Everyone drank. Everyone cried and hugged. I don’t know what it felt like for everyone else but for me? It felt performative. Like a sitcom. Everyone suffers a tragedy, we learn a lesson, then, twenty minutes later, we’re fine.
I saw Tim’s eyes and they looked a million miles away.
****
Before bed, Calvin hugged and said sorry, I know how close you two were.
I said thank you and thought of Tim an hour ago, Tim standing on the porch, staring out at the woods.
At the lake.
*******
That night, i couldn’t fall asleep, which is how I heard the sound of the back door closing.
I got out of bed and rushed to the back door, opening it slightly to see Tim walking away in the yellow fog night. His hair was growing thin.
There were wet footsteps at the door.
I followed him down the trail, watched his cell phone screen light up tiny patches of forest. I cut myself on branches. The night animals went silent the longer he walked. They knew were he was going. They knew what was going to happen. The night birds in their trees. The silent rodents paused at the edges of their dens. The quiet predators crouched in shadows. All watched. All waited.
He was headed to the lake.
I stopped at the last of the trees, stayed invisible.
I watched him walk across the grass.
The moon above was big and silver and glowed on the surface of the water.
Unbidden, I thought of Genesis: “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
Tim took off his shirt and the moon glowed on him. His pants and underwear followed and he stood naked, illuminated against the green of lake grass.
He waded into the lake.
The water rose up, up his legs, over his crotch, up to nearly his chest and then there was a disturbance in the waters.
From the middle of the lake, the liquid began to kick out, spiraling away. It seemed as if something was coming to the surface, something ancient, something very terrible.
And then, surfacing, was Charlotte.
She was beautiful. She didn’t look sick anymore. She didn’t look human anymore, although she still wore a shell of the skin I had thought of as Charlotte.
All of the sickness had left her body. The dying was gone. The smallness and wasting away had vanished, utterly and absolutely.
The Charlotte I had known looked pathetic and weak when brought up against this.It was like that was a lesser version of her and this was the perfect original from which every other copy of of Charlotte was made. But those were only copies. This was the source.
She moved across the waters, so fast it took my breath away. She was suddenly next to Tim. I couldn’t she his face, only hers. What was the expression on it?
As I was trying to recognize it Charlotte took Tim into her arms.
Her skin was white and pale, the color of the stomach of a fish, the color of marble, the color of the columns of ancient Grecian temples and her hair was bright and green and it wrapped tightly around Tim, the way ivy swallows abandoned buildings whole.
The green wrapped around his shoulders and kept going up, then slipped into his mouth. His eyes opened, and more tendrils went into his open mouth and his eyes opened even farther than before, far too far.
He kicked the water, his limbs splashing in the dead of night, in the somehow silent woods. She smiled and brought him close, her inhuman body pressed against his.
His hands scrambled, and he tried to rip the weeds from his mouth, to pull her from him, but she loved him, and she would never let him go.
He was screaming, but there wasn’t any sound, just Charlotte embracing her human lover until nothing remained.