I am lonely.
But what can I do?
I can't leave the water. Not anymore.
I doomed myself to these depths as soon as I decided to swim until my arms and legs could move no longer. I choked as my lungs slowly filled with what now sustains me. I sank, scarred but whole, into these depths; I resurfaced, ravaged and skinned from the long wet embrace, into the dry grips of the EMT after a dog walker spotted my corpse at the shore.
Nobody wanted to swim in the lake after that. People whispered of the crazy lady that drowned herself in the lake. Months passed. And then years.
Water sustains me now, but it is also my jailer. I can move but within bounds. Beyond that, I hit a wall of nothingness where senses are useless. It’s as if I exist in a box, free within its walls; but to venture outside of it is true death. There is no seeing, smelling, feeling, hearing, or tasting. It’s as if you cease to exist. Beyond the box, you can't even be a ghost anymore. You become deader than dead.
At least, within my watery cell, I can use my senses. This doesn't mean I get satisfaction from anything I experience. No. Aside from being stuck in your place of death, that's another thing I didn't know about being dead: you can no longer glean any emotion from new experiences. You know how some smells take you back to you childhood, or hearing a certain tone of voice can rouse sentiment or anger? You can’t feel those any longer from anything you sense. You can only feel from what was stored in your memory from having lived. You can remember emotions and recycle them, feel again because of them. But you can’t feel new feelings, not from something you haven’t experienced in your lifetime. Had I known this before my death, I would have savored and stored every bit of joy, anger, and even sadness from my lifetime so I’d never forget them. But I have kept some, I’m glad to report. And, aside from water, they, too, sustain me.
And this is why I’m lonely.
My memories make me so.
I remember his kisses and his embrace, our joy as we found out I was pregnant. We waited 3 years to have a child and now she was to be: a tiny seed sound asleep inside my womb, sustained by my fluids and our love. After 9 months, we held her in our arms, our seed.
To memorialize our joy, we planted an apple tree in our backyard when she turned one. Then another when she turned two. On her third birthday, my husband confessed that he’s been having an affair and asked for a divorce. For almost a year, I ingested a concoction of prescription pills to assuage my heartache. To memorialize my sorrow, drugged up on the eve of my daughter’s fourth birthday, I shaved my head with a razor, quite ineptly, and decorated my face, chest, and shoulders with cuts so deep that I needed stitches. Child Services took my mother’s word and placed myself and my daughter in her care. My mother and I had never gotten along, but she stayed with me for a year, vigilant and strict. She left after the last monthly home visit from Child Services, doubting but wanting to believe I was on the mend. I received papers saying I was now again fit to be a mother. Apart from quarterly home visits, my child was wholly mine again.
Then, shy of my daughter's fifth birthday, I killed her.
She was playing with her toys in the bath tub, her bright yellow bathing suit like sunshine against the white ceramic. The phone rang. It was my mother, asking me how I was, skeptical when I told her I was clean and sober. We were in the middle of a heated argument when I remembered that I had left the water running in the bath.
All I could see through the doorway was yellow floating in water. My daughter had slipped and hit her head on the tub when she attempted to climb out as it filled. Unconscious in the water, she had drowned. She drowned because of my neglect, was what the police told me. I was a drugged-up child killer, was what the media broadcasted to the world. I was charged with involuntary manslaughter and my trial dragged on for a month. There I was, shorn and scarred in my navy pantsuit, waiting to get judged, listening as I was being discussed.
The prosecutor stated that, though I unintentionally killed my child, I was responsible for her death because of neglect. He brought up my divorce and my incident with the razor, pointed out the scars on my face, visible to everyone, and said they haven’t quite healed. He argued that, with my wounds barely mended, how could anyone expect the same for my emotional and mental state? No. I was not mentally and emotionally fit to care for my child and because of that she is now dead.
But I had a good lawyer. He countered that Child Services deemed me fit to care for my child again. And for the kill, he pinned the error on my doctor, arguing that he had failed to notice the counteracting ingredients from my assortment of pills. My doctor, a gentle old man, got rattled by the assault of questions he received on the witness stand and inevitably damned himself. I was acquitted. The media turned. Suddenly I was to be pitied while Child Services, my doctor, and the huge pharmaceutical companies became the villains. I should sue, they said, and make millions. But all I could think of was my daughter's little body floating in the tub, serene and still. I was responsible for her death. I left her and she floated dead on the tub water.
I decided to join her.
That was when I walked towards the lake outside of our house. I walked then swam until I could no more. I welcomed drowning because I thought the water would unite us, my daughter and me. But, like I mentioned earlier, there are things you only find out once you're dead. One of them is about memory and feelings. The other is that you can't leave the place where you die. And one more I could only realize after I saw her again: that we keep our appearance at the time of our death. Perhaps, for ghosts – the ones who chose to stay in the world of the living, confined to their prisons – it is a reminder that they were once alive; they were mortal, and their bodies are a proof of that.
So, for years now, I've been watching her from the lake as she watches me from the window of the second floor bathroom where she had drowned. Unlike my scarred self, she was still beautiful and complete with her perpetual wet hair and bright yellow bathing suit. Sometimes we wave, content at the mere sight of each other. Other times I see her reach her arms out in sobs, screaming for me, and I powerless to go to her. She is five and now forever a child.
She will always need her mother.
One day, I spotted a young couple along the lake shore. They were beautiful and full of life, very much in love and filled with hope. They bought and moved into what was once my house. The day they moved in, I saw the woman carry a white Siamese cat in her arms. They were a lovely family. I thought, maybe my daughter will feel less lonely now with people and a cat inside the house with her. And I was right. Though she still showed herself in the window fairly regularly, she seemed happier and less needy. I suffered none of her sobbing and felt relieved. But then a month passed and I saw her waving at me from the window with one arm; with the other, she held the white cat in place, awkwardly but firmly. The next morning, I saw the man digging a hole in my former yard, a lump in a garbage bag beside it.
If and how she killed the cat, I will never know. But it became her favorite accessory, not companion. She couldn’t form a connection with it because we never owned a pet when we were alive. She didn’t know what it was like to love an animal. It was a new experience and one from which she couldn’t feel. So after a while, she pined for me again, for a mother’s love, but I could only give so much from my lake prison. The time came when she started screaming at me in anger, the way she had done when I had refused her a toy one time in the store. Her tantrums, then, always resulted in damage of some sort. Now, they could be called hauntings. She haunted that house, she did.
It was a sleepy afternoon when I overheard the couple arguing by the boardwalk. She was terrified and wanted to move, but he dismissed her fears and gave practical reasons for staying. They can’t afford to move, he said. But I’m too scared to live here, she said. There are no such things as ghosts, he said, and she screamed curses at him as he left her by the lake. Indifferent, I watched her cry, but I recognized the signs. She was where I was before my fatal swim. I knew it was only a matter of time before I gain a companion in the water.
But when the day came, I couldn't let her do it. I saw my daughter by the window, watching despondently as the woman swam to her death. I knew that if his wife died, the man would move out leaving my daughter with only a dead cat to keep her company. So, as soon she reached my prison, but before she grew too tired, I pulled the woman deep into the water and held her down. I did it to teach her a lesson, to teach her to fear death. At first, she was willing to let herself sink into the cold depths and die. Then, suddenly, she started struggling, trying to pull away from me with frenzy. It was then that I pushed her towards the shore, and she came up for air, coughing, sobbing, and breathing in the chilly morning air as if inhaling life. I was certain then that she will never want to end it again.
* * * *
A year passed.
My daughter again seemed content. She had me in the water watching her from afar; she had her live humans in the house with her. Their presence kept her from boredom; their fear kept her amused. One day, I saw the woman waddling along the shore, her belly round and tight. Two months later, she gave birth and that was when the trouble began.
My daughter, having been an only child in life, was a fiercely jealous sort. I recalled, when she was three, a cousin of hers, just a year older, stayed with us for the summer. He became very attached to me and she became violently jealous. With his every attempt at affection, she hurt the poor boy, so much so that he asked to go home, shortening his visit considerably. If she had been possessive then, then you can assume, after many years of being an only child in death, that she had grown even more so.
I caught glimpses of the couple's newborn when the woman would bring it out to get some sun. It was as a baby should be, small and loud. I felt nothing for it but feared what my daughter would do because of it. Her jealousy was palpable as she watched the mother and infant from her window, her gaze piercing and severe. My daughter had remained a child, yes, but she had grown cunning through the years, needing to be in order to keep amused. She hasn’t and will never outgrow her five-year-old frame and sinew, but her body had become strong from years of having moved it without fear. She knew nothing could hurt her. She knew she couldn't die again.
It was midnight when I heard a scream, long and terror-filled, followed by horrific moans that faded fast. Afterwards, I heard the man's voice repeat his wife's name over and over, rising in pitch and urgency as it went. When the EMT got there, they found him on the front steps, sobbing and cradling his crying baby. They took man and child away from the house as a team of forensic experts went inside to investigate. For weeks, the yellow crime scene tape kept the house empty. Then, one early morning, the man came home with a few people in tow. They spent the day carrying out furniture and boxes to two parked moving vans while he stayed rooted on the porch steps, staring vacantly before him. It took all but one day to clear out his past. He and his baby were gone from the house that late afternoon.
It was as the vans were pulling away that the woman appeared from the bathroom window. She was wearing a pink tank top and a shard of broken glass through one eye. My daughter was with her, holding her hand. I wondered if, despite the fear of death that I implanted within her during our encounter in the lake, the woman tried to end her life again and, this time, succeeded: smashed the bathroom mirror and stabbed herself in the eye with a broken piece? Or did my daughter, cunning and strong, do it for her?
Then the woman turned slightly, as if to get something. It was then that I saw the deep gash on the side of her neck extending to her shoulder blade. She couldn’t have done that.
After that day, I saw my daughter only once more. It was a lovely Hallmark card picture: the white cat sleeping on the window sill; my child’s new mother brushing her long wet tresses with hands so careful and loving. Maybe she remembers her love for her living child, and so loves my daughter now as she would have her own. Her face was unscarred and her countenance content, just how mine should have been for my daughter. She looked just how my daughter’s mother should be.
With sorrow, I watched them from bleak waters, my desolate lake prison. As she moved, the glass shard in her eye caught the last rays of afternoon sunlight and flickered at me, like the final efforts of a dying bulb. I said my last goodbye to my perfect daughter, my forever five-year-old. She deserved better. I stared at her until darkness fell, and I could see her no longer.
Lonely.
I am so lonely.
This is my first Friday Frights and I'm a little late in handing it in. The theme for the month of July is Terror in the Water. I have the water part down, but not the terror, methinks. So I apologize.
Friday Frights is a weekly literary event for members of the dark city. Writers contribute stories every Friday based on a weekly prompt. Readers enjoy the stories and vote for their favorite. Readers' choices published the following month on DarkMedia.com.
Friday Frights is a weekly literary event for members of the dark city. Writers contribute stories every Friday based on a weekly prompt. Readers enjoy the stories and vote for their favorite. Readers' choices published the following month on DarkMedia.com.