When Grandpa Vic died and the lawyer called to tell me I was now the owner of the house in the woods, I was more than a little surprised. Why would he leave his house to me? Then I realized that with mom gone, there simply wasn’t anyone else for it to go to. I was just the next person in line. I wanted to tell the lawyer that it wasn’t my house, not really. But if it wasn’t mine then whose was it?
I told Lauren about it that night when we both got home from work. I sat on the edge of the bed and explained as she changed out of her work clothes.
“You never talked about your grandfather.”
“I haven’t seen him since my mom’s funeral. He just hasn’t been a part of my life.”
“Will there be a service for him?”
“He didn’t want one. He was cremated.”
“Do we need to take care of bank accounts or anything?”
“Apparently he didn’t have any accounts.”
Lauren dropped her earrings into the jewelry box and gave me a perplexed look.
“How did he live?”
Lauren and I were both excited by the possibility of using my grandfather’s house as a summer home. We have a nice house in Grand Rapids but it’s old and it seems like we’re always fixing something. The potential of our home had been so exciting when we first bought it. We put hours of work into it on the weekends—painting, sanding, laying tile—but that all changed once the kids arrived. The possibility of another home—of more space, of somewhere to go when we simply wanted a change—was very appealing.
But I would have to tell Lauren and the kids about the creek and I didn’t know how to do that. I hoped an answer would come to me as Lauren and I drove up to see the house for the first time, but it didn’t. On our way up, we stopped at a gas station to fill the tank of the SUV. Lauren asked if I thought we should’ve brought the kids.
“It’s better if we make sure it’s safe first,” I said.
“Safe from what?”
“Ticks and all that.”
-—-
It was a two hour drive to the house and the GPS on my phone led us to increasingly remote areas. Thirty minutes out, we turned onto a dirt road and drove up and down hills.
“I’m on the extended network out here,” said Lauren looking at her phone.
We missed the turn to get to the house. I backed up and steered us onto an overgrown two-track. I was starting to think we were lost when we came into a clearing and the house appeared before us. It looked exactly like it did when I had last seen it as a kid. Two stories, chipping white paint, tall wild grass around it. There was a screened in porch in front of the house and a woodpile stacked up next to the in-ground cellar door. Lauren and I got out of the car and hesitantly circled the house, taking it all in.
“Wow,” said Lauren. “Not bad.”
I went to the back door and found the key hidden under the stone at the corner of the house while Lauren walked off on her own. I turned and saw Lauren at the edge of the creek and I hurried after her. But when I got there, nothing happened. The water was clear at the top and green at the bottom and the current was calm enough that you could see the details of the algae-covered rocks on the creek floor.
“I wonder if the kids can swim in it,” asked Lauren.
“We should get the water tested first.”
We unlocked the back door and went from room to room, surprised that the house was in such good shape. The interior wasn’t particularly well-decorated, but everything you needed was there.
“Your grandfather was almost a hundred? How did he take care of all this?”
“He was always spry.”
We had brought a small barbecue with us so I went outside and set it up in the fire pit and grilled some of those new burgers that taste just like meat but don’t have any animals in them. We found some plates in my grandfather’s kitchen and ate at the picnic table behind the house. After we ate, Lauren went inside to wash the dishes. I came into the kitchen as the sun was starting to set. Lauren was sudsing one of the plates.
“Come with me for a minute,” I said. “I want to show you something.”
“What?”
“You’ll see.”
She dried her hands and followed me down the dirt path to the creek. The sun was halfway below the horizon but there was enough light that the dark shapes of fishes could be seen darting around at the bottom of the water.
“Look at the sunset,” said Lauren.
“Uh-huh,” I said. I was watching the creek, waiting to see if what I remembered as a kid would happen.
“What do you want to show me?” she asked.
“Look at the water.”
“What am I looking for?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”
We watched for several minutes in silence. I could feel Lauren’s confusion as she patiently stood next to me. I started to think it wouldn’t happen, that I had imagined it all. Or maybe what I remembered had happened but they had left. I was getting ready to tell Lauren that we could go back inside when I saw a pair of yellow eyes blink in a dark hole at the bottom of the creek.
“Look,” I whispered and pointed.
I looked at Lauren and I could tell that she saw it, too.
The eyes blinked again and then moved forward. It gracefully slid out of the hole at the bottom of the creek. It was just like I remembered, a dark green woman with long flowing hair and skin covered in a muddy green film. Another woman swam out of the hole behind her, and then another. All three of them were still here. They swam in a circle at the bottom of the creek. Their long hair trailing behind them like stringy, dark veils. Their movements kicked up a fog of sediment around them.
“What am I seeing?” asked Lauren, her eyes wide.
“Come on,” I said. “They feed at night.”
-—
We talked about it the whole drive home. I told Lauren what little I knew about them. I called them water witches, which is what my grandfather had always called them. I’m not sure why. I told her about my childhood experience at the creek. The more we discussed it, the more normal it became. It was like a fresh chip in a tooth that feels less foreign every time you wag your tongue over it. After a long, looping conversation about nature and the supernatural, we came back to the matter at hand. What would we do with the house? To answer that question, we did what we always tried to get our kids to do; we reviewed all our options and tried to make the best decision possible. We only had a few choices. We could sell the house without telling prospective owners about the water witches, but the new owners would eventually find out, possibly in a ‘not-good-for-anyone’ way. We could keep the house and try to get rid of the witches, but what right did we have to do that? We could keep the house and never visit it, but then who eventually gets the house? Amber and Jason would, and then what would they do with the witches? The last option we considered was the one we wound up going with.
“We keep it,” said Lauren definitively as I pulled into the driveway. “And we learn to live in peace with them.”
“I’m all for peace.”
And I am but, just to be safe, I brought the rifle up with me the next weekend when we went up again with the kids in tow.
“Is that really necessary?” asked Lauren as I packed the gun case in the trunk behind the duffle bags and watermelon.
“I’m hoping it’s not at all necessary.”
Lauren prepped the kids in the car ride up.
“Remember how we sometimes talk about how animals are just as scared of you as you are of them and if you leave them alone then they’ll leave you alone?”
“Yeah,” said Amber and Jason in unison.
“Well at this new house, there are some animals that we have to respect. We’ll tell you more about it when we get there.”
As the sun started to set that evening, Lauren and I walked with the kids to the edge of the water and looked down. When the women slid out of the hole, Amber smiled and Jason gasped. They wanted to stay and watch them but I told them that we had to get dinner made. We walked back to the house and had a talk around the dinner table about the newly re-christened ‘water women.’ The night before, Lauren had suggested we refer to them as ‘water women’ because ‘water witches’ sounded dangerous. I knew that nomenclature was important, that the way we talk about others affects how we treat them.
“But they are kind of dangerous,” I had ventured.
“Says the man with a gun.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I told the kids the story, though. About what happened when I was a kid. How I hadn’t listened to my Grandpa’s rules and I had stayed floating on an inner-tube tethered to a tree on the bank as the sun was setting. My feet were dangling over the edge of the tube, kicking gently in the water, when one of them grabbed my ankle. Its hand was shockingly cold. It pulled me down, strong and steady. I tried to hold onto the inner tube but my hands kept slipping on the wet black rubber. Grandpa Vic had been walking to the creek to tell me to get out when he saw me go under. I had looked up and saw the dark circle of the inner tube receding from me. What I didn’t tell Amber and Jason was that I had also looked down and saw the woman smiling, her yellow eyes staring up at me through the cloudy water, her face covered in a web of mud.
“Your great grandfather saved me. He dove in and somehow pried me loose from its grip. I don’t remember all of it.”
“Was it trying to kill you?” asked Jason.
“I don’t know. It might have wanted to play. It might have mistaken me for one of their own.”
“Sometimes behavior that we see as threatening isn’t meant to be,” said Lauren.
“And sometimes it is,” I quickly added.
Amber looked like she was about to cry.
“But the water is safe so long as you don’t stay in past sundown,” said Lauren.
“Can they come out of the water?” asked Amber. Lauren looked at me.
“They can but they don’t,” I said. “Not unless they have to. And so long as you aren’t in the water when it’s their turn then they won’t come out after you.”
That night, as Lauren and I lay in the bed in my grandfather’s old room, we discussed whether the conversation was successful.
“Amber looked terrified,” I said. “I wonder if it’s too much for an eight year old.”
“I’m more worried about Jason. He’s almost thirteen. Remember how stupid you were when you were thirteen?”
Lauren looked out the dark window next to the bed. I listened to the crickets outside.
“You need to go swimming tomorrow so they won’t be scared,” she said.
“I’m not going swimming in there.”
“Your grandfather swam in there all the time and he lived to be an old man. If you don’t go in, the kids never will.”
She was right. I had to lead by example. I had to show that fear—even a deeply-engrained, psychologically-scarring fear—could be overcome. So the next morning, I put on my swim trunks and grabbed my beach towel.
“You better be coming, too,” I said to Lauren.
“I am.”
“Do you think I should bring my gun?”
Lauren considered for a moment.
“No.”
We walked to the creek together and waded into the cool water. We swam in place as the kids stood in the wild grass on the shore, watching us with their arms crossed.
“See,” Lauren called out to them. “It’s safe.”
I kept glancing down as I kicked to stay afloat, looking for the dark shapes of the women, waiting to feel that cold hand on my ankle again. But it never happened.
“Yeah,” I echoed. “Safe.”
Amber and Jason eventually came into the water and started swimming. We stayed in with them, saying ‘see, it’s nice’ over and over. We played Marco Polo and there were a few moments where we all seemed to forget about the beings sleeping below us.
It all worked better than Lauren and I had hoped. The kids relaxed as the weekend went on and they calmly policed one another about staying away from the water as the sun started to set. They would swim during the day but, a little after noon, they would get out of the water and play in the woods or read in the house.
As we drove back home after the last day of summer, I smiled at Lauren.
“We survived our first summer with the water witches,” I said.
“Water women,” she corrected.
“Right! Water women.”
We were proud of ourselves. We had been presented with an ethically murky situation, we had given it thought, and we had found a solution that offered the maximum benefit for all parties involved. Sure, it would have been better if we had been able to talk to the water women to get them to weigh in, but that just didn’t seem possible here.
-—
Of course, it couldn’t last. As happens with so many peaceful arrangements, something unplanned occurs. It always does. It’s nothing new. Chaos reigns, I suppose. Chaos, in our case, was a family that moved in a mile up the dirt road from my grandfather’s house. The new family had bought ten acres of undeveloped land and built a mansion of a summer home after we closed our house for the season. The following May, Lauren and I went on a walk through the woods and admired the house from a distance. I’m rarely impressed by big houses, but this house really was something. It was an incredible three-story farm house that seemed to have dropped straight from the pages of Home & Garden magazine into the middle of a secluded forest. Lauren and I took guilty pleasure in observing that the house didn’t have easy access to the creek which curved a little before our house and ran in the opposite direction of this new construction.
Lauren met the family during one of the trips into town to stock up on food. She filled me in on them when she got back. They were called the Hills. Lauren said they were exactly the people you’d expect to live in that house. Handsome, well-dressed, charming. The husband was a doctor. The wife was a lawyer. They had a son named Max who was the same age as Jason.
“They were actually really nice,” said Lauren.
The Hills had given Jason an open invitation to come over and play with Max any time he wanted. The next day, Jason walked over to the Hills’s house and returned later that evening with awestruck reports about the experience.
“They have everything there,” he marveled. “A basketball court behind the house. A movie theater. A game room. They even have a tiny bowling alley.”
“How about that,” I said.
As the summer wore on, Jason started spending more time at the Hills’s house and less time at ours.
“What do you guys do over there?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Play basketball. Play video games. And eat. They have so much food.”
“Like what do they have?”
Jason shrugged.
“Like everything.”
I sensed Jason was growing enamored with the Hills’s lifestyle and disenchanted with ours. So I was surprised when, halfway through the summer, he asked if Max could come over for dinner.
My mental picture of Max was of a chubby rich kid who’s always carrying around a chocolate candy bar, like one of the doomed children who toured Willy Wonka’s factory. But he wasn’t like that. He was a skinny kid with shaggy brown hair and a friendly skater vibe. He was like a child model from a Gap Kids ad, but with a likable personality to boot. He seemed to always do what was most advantageous, which meant he was comfortably polite at dinner. He said please and thank you. He answered questions calmly and made eye contact. He was like a tiny adult. I hadn’t wanted to like Max, but I couldn’t see a reason not to.
What wound up bothering me was the way Jason kept trying to brag to him. When our home in Grand Rapids came up during dinnertime conversation, Jason talked about how big the park up the block from us was. Max could see that Jason was trying to impress him and he knew better than to call attention to it. He just smiled and politely nodded.
Lauren and I washed the dishes after dinner and talked in low tones about Jason’s behavior while he and Max played board games upstairs.
“I think Jason is trying to impress Max, wouldn’t you say?” I asked.
“Kids do that. It’s normal.”
“The pissing contests just go on forever.”
Later that night, after the board games, I walked Max and Jason back up the road to Max’s house. I stood at a distance, letting them talk up ahead. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, just the friendly rising and falling of their voices.
“Thanks so much for having me over,” said Max before hurrying up his driveway. I had hoped to have an opportunity to meet his parents, but it didn’t happen. I took another glance back at the house before leaving; it seemed to glow from inside.
On the walk back home, Jason was silent. I wanted to say something to him but I wasn’t sure what.
“You okay?” I finally asked.
“I’m alright.”
“Max has a really nice house. Sounds like they have lots of cool stuff.”
“Yeah,” he said, and paused. “I just wish we had a few special things, too.”
“We have special things.”
“Like what?”
It took me a moment. What did we have? It can be easy to forget.
“The creek,” I said and then, without thinking, “the water women.”
Jason looked at me.
“Could we see them again some time?”
“No. They’re really dangerous.”
“But we won’t go in. I just want to see them.”
“No,” I said again, and Jason went quiet.
As we walked up the path towards the house, I looked over at the creek. What if we didn’t go into the water, I thought. What if we just looked at them?
Jason saw me looking at the creek.
“Alright,” I finally said. “Don’t tell your mother we did this.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Let’s go,” I said and veered into the tall grass.
There was a thin fog suspended over the creek. I looked back at the house and saw Lauren busying herself with something in the bright windows of the kitchen.
Jason stood a little behind me on the bank. It seemed too quiet and I realized that the frogs weren’t chirping. I looked back at Jason and saw fear on his face.
“It will be okay,” I said. “We’re just going to look at them.”
The surface of the water reflected the moonlight in the ripples of the current. We couldn’t see anything below.
“It’s too dark,” said Jason and I heard his voice quaver.
“Here.”
I turned on my flashlight and shone the beam at the surface of the water. I had expected to see one of their dark silhouettes swimming in circles at the bottom of the water, but it was just below the surface; its hair blooming in the water around its green face like a corona of seaweed. It looked at us with wide yellow eyes. Its mouth was open. Jason let out a pained yelp, loud and sudden, like a dog whose tail has been stepped on. I turned and we hurried towards the house.
“Don’t tell your mother,” I whispered as I pulled open the back door.
He quickly nodded.
Jason went upstairs while I casually locked the door behind us. Lauren poured water from the tea kettle into a mug.
“Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said, surprising myself at how convincing I sounded. I stepped into the kitchen and watched her blow on the tea.
“I’m gonna read up in bed,” she said.
“I may go outside and smoke that Cuban,” I said, trying to ignore the thudding in my chest.
Lauren made a playful look of disgust. She hates when I smoke cigars.
“Make sure you brush your teeth twice.”
I got the cigar from the ziplock bag I had in my suitcase and went outside to the picnic table next to the fire pit. I sat at the back of the house, smoking and watching the creek. Lauren turned off the lights on the first floor. I waited for the three women to slowly rise from the water and walk towards me through the fog. Or maybe they would move quickly, darting into the forest and circling the house. None of it happened, though. The creek flowed, the fog hung, and I smoked.
By the time I finished my cigar, I felt satisfied that nothing was going to come and get us. If they were going to attack, they would have done it by now. I tossed the cigar butt in the ash of the fire pit and went inside. I locked the deadbolt and pushed open the curtains to take another look at the creek. I almost screamed. One of them was on the other side of the window; its face inches from mine. They weren’t supposed to be able stay out of the water, I thought, but I didn’t really know if that was true.
Its yellow eyes stared into mine. Its pupils were diamond-shaped. My face was partially transposed on hers in the reflection of the glass. I returned its stare, hoping it would leave. It tried the door handle. I put my hand on the knob but I couldn’t stop it from turning. I remembered the strength of its grip on my ankle. What was it that had kept my grandfather alive all those years? A healthy fear of nature. A fear I hadn’t developed. And now the only way to fight a threat was with another threat. It tried the door handle again. I heard a thud from the basement. I ran to the closet, pulled out the rifle, and ran upstairs and into the bedroom. Lauren was asleep.
“Lauren,” I said and shook her.
“What happened?” she immediately asked.
“It’s the witches. They’re in the house.”
We ran to the top of the stairs. It was dark but I could make out their shapes at the bottom of the stairs. I pointed the rifle at them.
“What should I do?” I asked. “Should I shoot them?”
Lauren didn’t say anything. I pictured what the gun would do to them.
“Get out of here!” I yelled. “Go!”
My throat tightened.
I heard the kids door open behind me and Amber let out a pinched scream.
“Quiet,” said Lauren.
We all stood in silence. I kept the gun pointed at them and they stared up at us from the bottom of the stairs. The muscles in my arms burned and the joints in my shoulders creaked, but I didn’t tilt the gun down. After ten minutes, I could feel everyone relaxing. It’s incredible how quickly something can normalize. One of them walked away and the others followed.
We listened to them moving around below us. It sounded like they were exploring. Picking things up and dropping them. Knocking things over. I imagined their baffled curiosity at our family’s world. I wondered if it meant anything to them. They occasionally hissed and barked at each other. It sounded angry to me, but what did I know.
The sound of their movements downstairs stopped a little before sunrise. We waited until the windows had filled with light and then we slowly made our way downstairs. We walked through toppled furniture and shattered dishes. We hurried through the tall grass to the car. We drove away and took nothing with us. None of it was essential.
We don’t talk about it much as a family but Jason will occasionally ask questions.
“It’s just sitting there unused?” he asked me last week after dinner.
“Yes,” I said.
“Couldn’t we do something with it? Maybe sell it?”
“Would that be ethical?” I asked.
“It just seems like a waste. It’s our house.”
“Maybe it’s not,” I said.
“If it’s not ours then whose is it?” he asked.
I didn’t have an answer.