Summer People, page 4
“I’m nonconfrontational, fine,” Christmas interrupted. “But at least I’m . . . steady. At least I’m not so uncomfortable being who I am that I have to change my whole identity every fifteen minutes.”
“What? Change my whole identity?” Lexi said, laughing, but clearly offended. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Remember the year you tried to get me to start smoking cigarettes?” Christmas asked. “’Cause that was sooo wild and rebellious. But by the end of the summer you were all into wellness and ‘self-care’ and begging me to go to yoga with you every day? Although that might have been more about that summer people yoga guy you thought was totally cool. What was his name? River or Leif or Sky or something?”
“Stop,” Lexi said, annoyed. “I was fourteen.”
“Fifteen,” Christmas corrected.
“Jesus Christ,” Lexi said. “What, are you taking notes? Why are you acting like this? I’m sorry that it’s a problem for you that I’ve, I don’t know,” she shook her head, “continued to develop as a person and am not okay with homophobia. It’s not my fault that the people here are just as gross as this disgusting lake.”
“Fine,” Christmas said. “I mean, I get it. You’ve made it perfectly clear how much you hate it here.” Christmas felt her throat tightening. She knew she would cry if she kept talking and she was grateful for the darkness of the night. She considered rising, leaving, simply going home.
“What?” Lexi asked. “Christmas,” she moaned. “God, you’re so sensitive. So now if I disagree with you, your feelings are going to be hurt?”
Lexi made this last remark as though to have hurtable feelings was the most contemptible, irritating thing in the world.
Christmas almost couldn’t speak. “I’m not—” Christmas began but had to stop. She cleared her throat. Willing herself not to cry was, naturally, having the opposite effect. She managed to squeak out: “I just feel . . . yeah, that meeting was messed up, but even before that, you decided you’re too cool to be here and you’d rather be on your phone and when you’re not on your phone all you want to do is tell me much you hate it here.”
“Maybe I am too cool to be here,” Lexi snapped. “And yeah, maybe I would rather be on my phone,” she added. At that moment, the phone, resting on the arm of Lexi’s chair, lit up again. She continued, her tone nasty and clipped, “Believe it or not, not everything is about you and your beloved lake. There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”
Christmas waited, but Lexi didn’t speak right away.
And then the quiet was disturbed by a groaning noise and a loud, sloppy splash. It was hard to tell exactly where the noise came from, but both girls instinctively turned their heads to the right, as though they’d be able to see through the darkness.
“What kind of nut goes swimming in the middle of the night?” Lexi asked, her voice still full of contempt. She sucked on the vape pen and exhaled a puff of smoke.
“That doesn’t sound like swimming,” Christmas said.
They sat, listening. The little hairs on Christmas’s arms stood up.
“Probably a drunk fell in the lake,” Lexi said.
Christmas shook her head, no. “I think we should go see.”
Lexi made a small noise of impatience but gestured to the canoe tied up next to the speedboat. “After you,” she whispered. She rose and stuck the vape pen in her pocket.
Christmas rose, too, relieved to have a distraction from their argument, but at the same time she was suddenly terrified of going out on the dark lake in the middle of the night. She didn’t know what it was, if it was the tiny amount of pot she’d consumed or the fight with Lexi or even the gentle lapping of the waves that seemed almost aggressively quiet, but something was definitely off.
“Let’s go,” she whispered.
6
The noise could have been an oversized waterbird diving for a fish or maybe a loose branch finally breaking free and splashing down into the water. But there had been a strange, strangled, human sound too. And even if the sound had been amplified by the quiet of the lake in the dark night, Christmas—and maybe Lexi—knew it was something big and maybe terrible.
Wordlessly, Lexi untied the canoe and Christmas stepped in, then held on to the dock as Lexi boarded. Christmas sat in the front, a cold trickle of sweat running down her spine.
“I think the noise came from over by Cunningham’s Woods,” Christmas said softly.
“I’ll steer us that way,” Lexi said.
Cunningham’s Woods was a large lot of untouched trees adjacent to Cunningham’s Farm, itself several acres of lakefront property, some of which was used as a cow pasture. Although most of the shoreline was gently lit by the houses along the perimeter of the lake, the woods, empty of people, were extra dark.
Christmas and Lexi moved forward in thick blackness, Christmas squinting ahead. She could just make out some of the trees along the shore.
“Did you bring your phone?” Christmas asked. “Can you turn on your flashlight?”
She heard Lexi laying down her paddle and, a moment later, the area directly in front of Christmas was illuminated. The dark water rippled before her, and Christmas moved the boat closer to the shore.
She was just about to tell Lexi that they should turn around, that it was too dark to see anything anyway, when Lexi, the light bouncing and then returning to a certain spot, whispered, “There’s something floating up ahead.”
And in the moonlight, Christmas could see it too. A large lump near the shore, half submerged, lapped by gentle waves.
Christmas saw flannel. Then, the rest of a body registered, like one of those old Polaroid pictures, the image emerging gradually. It was a person, and he was floating facedown.
“Oh my god,” Lexi gasped. “I think—are they alive? Should we help?”
Christmas didn’t answer. Though there was a steep drop-off in the water in front of Cunningham’s Woods—Christmas knew this because she knew the lake bottom, had spent countless days of every summer boating and swimming and fishing this lake—the person was floating in such a way to suggest shallow water, that their knees and hands were resting on the lake floor. She pulled the canoe a little closer. “Hey! Are you okay?” she called, as though the person would simply roll over, pop up, and say hello.
Until that moment, Christmas had felt as though she were trying to move through glue, that the canoe was so slow and heavy. But something switched, suddenly, and she saw what it was that she would need to do. Unlike the bouncing beam in Lexi’s shaking hand, Christmas’s mind narrowed and focused and steadied. She’d read before that an ADHD brain could come in handy in a crisis. It certainly seemed to be the case in this situation.
She brought the canoe in closer and, when she was certain it was shallow enough, she lay down her oar, pushed off her flip-flops, and scrambled out of the boat, careful not to tip Lexi over.
“What are you doing!” Lexi cried, her voice high and panicky. “We need to get help. We need to go back.”
Christmas had been correct about the depth; a glacial lake, Sweet Lake stayed shallow for twenty, thirty, sometimes forty feet from the shore. Here, they were only ten feet from land. As she stepped in, the water rose up to her thighs, but the lake sloped up dramatically as she waded toward the body. The rocks were sharp and slippery, and she moved as fast as she could without falling.
Lexi gasped behind her. “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.”
Christmas paused a few feet from the body—it was a man. She was afraid to touch him. In that split second, she couldn’t decide if it would be worse if he were alive or dead. Dead, she concluded quickly. That would be worse.
She pushed. He rolled easily onto his back. Christmas gasped and recoiled. The man’s face was swollen and shiny and covered in green slime, but she recognized him.
“It’s Lemy!”
The green substance was algae from the lake, and Christmas wiped at it, trying to move it away from his eyes and mouth, but his skin looked so tender and painful, his eyes swollen shut, pursed together, that she didn’t want to touch him, to hurt him further.
Then she realized: Lemy wasn’t breathing.
“Help me!” Christmas cried to Lexi. “We need to get him out of the water.”
When Lexi didn’t move, Christmas clasped Lemy’s ankles and began dragging him to the shore, slipping every few steps on the rocky lake bottom. “Stop shining that light in my eyes and get over here!” Christmas shouted.
In the shallower water, Lemy got caught on the rocks. “Lexi, come on,” Christmas growled, but her friend remained immobilized in the canoe.
Christmas began to swing Lemy’s body, positioning him so that his head was mostly on land. She put a hand over Lemy’s mouth but didn’t feel any breath.
She heard Lexi’s quavering voice. “I’m trying to call 911.”
“There’s no signal on the lake!” Christmas bellowed over her shoulder.
She positioned Lemy on his side and pounded on his back. Then, she turned him faceup again and, putting one hand on top of the other on his chest, began pushing down. She remembered from the mandatory CPR class she’d taken at school that she was supposed to do thirty compressions, but she kept losing her count. Behind her, she heard Lexi finally splashing toward land.
Christmas tilted Lemy’s head back and held his nose closed. She blew into his mouth and, with one hand on his chest, felt her own breath inflating his lungs. She thought how strange, and marveled at how in some ways, bodies are such simple machines: a tube connected to bellows.
Lemy suddenly gasped and began to vomit. Alarmed, Christmas fell backward onto the heels of her hands, sliding on the slippery rocks and splashing down into the lake before sitting forward again, pulling him on to his side so that the water could drain out of his body.
Lexi whimpered and backed away.
7
When Christmas remembered it later, time seemed distorted, at once both fast and slow. The paddle over to Cunningham’s Woods seemed to take years, but dragging Lemy to shore, pounding his chest, breathing into his mouth—that was all mere moments. Lexi ran, crashing into the woods, closer to the road, and was able to get a signal; she called the police and then her grandparents and then, fast and slow as they waited for help, Lexi alternately screaming for help and pacing, cursing, looking at her phone. Her grandparents came quickly in the motorboat, and the police did, too, their blue-and-red flashing lights illuminating the woods as they made their way toward the flare Mr. Hansen had set off to let them know where they were.
Wrapped in a scratchy blanket, Christmas talked to Officer Ben Pappas, a guy only a few years older than her and who had a younger sister in Christmas’s graduating class. Then time sped up again and suddenly he and another officer were driving her home, just down the road. Her parents had been called, but she’d told them not to come, assured them that she was on her way. Back at her house, Ben walked her in and told her parents she was a “real hero.”
She gave them a succinct version of events and took a shower so hot her skin seared. She’d never before felt so repulsed by the lake and itchy and desperate to get it off her. But it wasn’t just the lake—it was the damp wet heaviness of Lemy’s clothes, his cold lips, his disfigured face.
After her shower, she was unsure of what to do with herself. Should she try to sleep? She was way too wired. Should she call Lexi? No, she wouldn’t want to risk waking her. She could pull up a show on her phone, but that felt too callous.
She forced herself to get in bed, where she lay with her eyes open, roiling.
Lexi’s arrival that afternoon seemed like it had happened eons earlier, in a happier, better time. And yet, even those more placid hours had been marked by worry and fear. Despite the drama of the last few hours, she couldn’t help but wonder and fret, tossing and turning, about whatever it was that Lexi wanted to tell her. Maybe Martha really was her girlfriend; maybe that was why she’d gotten so annoyed when Christmas had teased her. Christmas felt a deep, aching, shame and regret, a longing for a do-over, an anger that life afforded no such opportunities to simply take things back.
Lexi had certainly had more “experience” than Christmas, and this was something that had come up—come between them—before. Christmas had kissed—and only kissed—a total of two boys, while Lexi had apparently kissed so many people that she’d lost count, and had done other things as well, things she had begun to tell Christmas about, but which made Christmas blush and mumble, “I don’t need the details.”
“You’re such an innocent,” Lexi had sighed. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“I’m such an innocent,” Christmas returned, “that I don’t even want to know what I’m missing.”
Now, Christmas considered, maybe it shouldn’t have mattered that Christmas didn’t want to know. If Lexi had wanted to tell her, to share it with her, she should have listened. Even if it had made her uncomfortable. She probably should have listened.
8
Woken by the alarm on her phone—the sound of chirping birds—her mind snapped right into worry mode.
She moved quickly: dressing, swallowing her medicine, lacing her sneakers, then stashing her phone and pepper spray in her fanny pack—double-checking but stopping herself from checking a third time.
Running would help her sort out the events of the day before. The morning was chilly and foggy, the lake shrouded in a pretty, gray mist. It was, mercifully, too early and cool for the bugs and just the right time to catch the riotous morning songs of the birds, many of whom congregated in the Miller front yard, which was dotted with an absurd assortment of her father’s homemade birdhouses and feeders.
After the initial pain of getting started, Christmas began to tune out, letting the run and the rhythm take over her body, while her mind, following its own pattern, continued to review the recent events: Lemy unconscious, his flannel shirt floating in the water, Lexi complaining about “these people,” the sound of the splash cutting through the dark night, Lexi angrily accusing Christmas of laughing at the “f-word.”
The run did its next trick—or maybe the medicine kicked in—because Christmas was able to turn it off, or at least turn it down. Then she was just moving and not thinking at all.
After a while, though, her mind wandered, again, back to Lemy. Who could have done that to him? Was it about the fight at the meeting?
Lemy—one of the kindest, funniest, smartest people Christmas knew—was the opposite of the “ignorant” rednecks that Lexi seemed to think populated Sweet Lake. Christmas wished she had said that last night, wished she had pointed to Lemy and Curly as examples of the cool locals.
Lemy and Curly lived in Lemy’s family’s Victorian farmhouse, the porch adorned with a rainbow flag and the front lawn featuring BLM and antifracking signs. These men cared about the lake as much as Christmas did, which Christmas had discovered after she’d started an environmental club at the high school as her senior service project. One of its goals was to investigate the algae blooms. Although the club never got past writing up their mission statement, their endeavors were reported in the local paper. One day, when Christmas was sitting on her dock, Lemy and Curly paddled up in their kayaks. They told her they were proud of her, thought she was doing great work, and invited to come to their house that afternoon for tea or coffee. (“Or a soda. I don’t know what the kids drink these days,” Lemy had said.)
Despite their age difference and Christmas’s initial shyness, Lemy and Curly put her at ease almost immediately. She’d gone over to their house and drunk peppermint tea and the three of them had a wide-ranging conversation about the lake and the community, the stubbornness of some of the old families, the recent return of the beloved heron to the lake, composting, and what Curly called “radical recycling.”
In Lemy and Curly’s house, Christmas found examples of a certain kind of adult, an idea of the sort she might like to be: unaffected, appreciative of nature and the lake, worldly, knowledgeable, and casually sophisticated. They drove a car that ran on the leftover oil from the restaurant where Curly worked as a chef, the same restaurant from which he often brought home copious leftovers that he and Christmas and Lemy shared, sitting together at the big dining table made of reclaimed wood from a local barn.
After that first visit, a precedent was set: though they would devote a portion of Christmas’s visit to discussing environmental issues, they would also turn to conversations about social justice, art, and politics. Lemy and Curly seemed to delight in introducing Christmas to authors, shows, and ideas; she was a happy, enthusiastic student. They loaned her books by bell hooks and Peter Singer, texted her links to articles in The Sun and to movies by Bong Joon-ho (like Okja). Curly sometimes tried to teach her how to cook, but she was both uninterested and not good at reading recipes, which put cooking squarely on the list of activities Christmas (not unhappily) eschewed.
“I’d rather just eat,” she’d once told Curly, not trying to be funny, but making Lemy crow with laughter nevertheless.
9
Christmas ran four miles the day after she found Lemy in the lake, returning home just as the sun had really settled itself in the sky, the lake’s mist now burned off completely. The Millers always left the front door unlocked—a good thing, because Christmas had never met a key she couldn’t lose. Entering, she stepped out of her muddy sneakers in the hall, hoping to grab something to eat and avoid further discussion of the previous night’s events before she headed to work. Her parents, however, were lying in wait.
“That you, Chris?” her father called.
“Yeah.” She padded down the hall to where her mother and father sat, drinking coffee in the kitchen.
Her parents, like Christmas, were small, lean people, and they fit comfortably around the round kitchen table at which they ate all their meals. Once, Christmas’s Aunt Inez had joked that the Millers were the picture of the three bears, and they’d all laughed, because it was true. Christmas thought of this again as she regarded them in their mismatched wooden chairs around the table, her dad, in his old Dickies jeans, and her mom, still in her robe and pajama pants. They looked back at her with expectant eyes.
