THE SPLASH

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Submitted Date 12/07/2018
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The gray sun had had lifted the dark skirt of nighttime rainclouds, peeking over the edge of the lake. The day promised rain, but far less compared to the day before, and it was our last day at the cottage. I had promised my son a fishing trip – sort of a farewell before my wife and I sent him off to college. Instead, we’d spent the weekend trying to salvage our plans around a low-burning hearth in the Wisconsin wilderness. Our Friday night hike had been cut short and Saturday was spent drinking beer and playing board games in the futile belief that the rain would let up. He seemed in good spirits, but I wanted to make the trip memorable for him. I wanted him to know that I’d miss him.

Our fishing supplies were in the boat now – a seventeen-foot steel skiff with a tiny little motor on the back. The rods were propped on the tackle box, snaking out over the edge and casting dark lines on the swelling water. Rivulets of rain were sluicing down the edge of the boat and joining the echoes of tiny raindrops. My son brushed his hair out of his face, put the hood of his raincoat back up, and smiled at me.

“Any chance we’ll catch something good?”

I rubbed my chin. “Fishing’s supposed to be good this time of year. With the rain, I don’t know. But I hope so. Let’s get something big.”

His smile grew wider. He lifted his leg up and clambered into the metal body, his boots thunking against its belly and smearing mud across its face. After a moment of wondering if it might be better to wait a while longer, I climbed in after him, took my seat at the stern, and fired up the engine. It sputtered and the whir was drowned as it dipped into the dark water. The dock faded away at our backs.

We went until the coast was just a dark stain on the five o’clock horizon. The waves heaved our skiff up and down, welling up on either side before pushing past us. I pulled the motor out of the water and killed it, absentmindedly checking the clasps on my life vest afterward. Lake Superior was too deep to drop an anchor. We’d have to just watch the turn of the boat.

My son had been talking the whole time. He was excited for college, excited to be attending UW Madison – a place so different from where he’d grown up. His hands were fumbling with the little green tackle box and I seized my pole to bait it. Just as he reached his hand for the nightcrawlers – that’s when we heard the splash.

“Shit.”

“Is everything okay, dad?”

“I think something fell overboard. Must’ve knocked it off with my ass. Wanna check it out?”

I was still pushing the hook through the worm’s gut, my hands slithering off its ribbed tail as I attempted to pinch and spear that too. My son set his pole down and the boat rocked as he scooted to the other edge of his seat. It was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was hollow.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Dad, there’s a lady in the water.”

It took my mind a minute to register what he’d said. We were two miles from shore, maybe more. There were cottages, sure, but no one swam far out in Lake Superior. It was a freshwater sea – wide and cold and with its own strong-grasping undercurrent. It dropped off ten feet from the shoreline to God-only-knew how deep. There were rumors that ancient vessels still lay at the lake’s belly, frozen in the ice that never melted. I dropped my rod and jumped to my feet.

The boat swayed hard and I grabbed the same edge as my son to steady myself. That’s when I saw her – bare naked, pale breasts, eyes closed. As the waves lapped at the edges of our boat, they cut around her, just floating there. We yelled but there was no response, not a twitch here nor a tremor there. She looked as if she were simply asleep, her back kissing the cool water below, the rain dappling her stomach and her chest and her thighs from above. Her hair was fanned out around her head, soaking wet and snaking on the undulation of the lake. The weirdest part, though, was that she was clean. Every inch of her was unmarred – there were no cuts or bruises, no bulges or gashes or wounds. She was Snow White in a glass coffin cast out to sea. The boat was thrown off balance again.

I realized I had been staring for too long. My son had grabbed a paddle and was yelling for her to grab it. He held it by the thin edge and pointed it out across the dark expanse of the water, but it wouldn’t reach. Our boat had drifted too far from her. I dug under the seat for the ring buoy and threw it over. It landed with a splash – too short to reach her. My son turned toward me, his face screwed up, his voice drowned by the din of the storm winds: “What do we do? We need to get her, dad! We need to save her!” The lady in the water drifted away soundlessly in response. For a moment, there was a look in my son’s eyes as if he might leap overboard. I grabbed his shoulder to stop him.

There was no doubt in my mind, now, that she was dead – or in the very least unconscious. What had been meant to be a simple fishing trip had instead turned out to be a harrowing event – the discovery of a body, or a soon-to-be-body if we didn’t act quickly. And still, I couldn’t bring myself to reach for the paddles or to try the buoy again. Each moment I sat frozen, the body drifted farther away in the frigid waters, bobbing with the scoop of the waves. I turned again and began to reach for a paddle, but my eyes scanned the horizon for some glimmer of hope. That’s when I saw the approaching boat.

I changed trajectory and grabbed the emergency kit beneath my seat. The pack was soaked but, inside, a plastic container had saved the handful of flares. I tore it open and ripped the top off one – the red light blooming to life. I held it up and began to yell. My son began to yell too.

The other vessel sped up and I knew, by the spotlights, that some manner of fortune had smiled upon us. Great and white, a high-powered motor chopping at the waves below, a Coast Guard rose ever closer in view. As he approached, he heralded, and he boomed his question of our distress through some massive speaker tucked between the flashing lights at the boat’s head.

“There’s a body!” I yelled back, still waving my arms. My bones were stiff with the chill and ached as they slid past one another. “Over there! A woman! A body!”

His boat scooped around ours and the engine cut. I saw as the spotlights angled into the early-morning waters, shearing through the darkness in shafts. They swooned over the waters again and again, reaching farther each time, but they fell on nothing but chopping waves and murky depths. No woman, no body, no source of the splash – just empty water and more empty water until the horizon crouched to touch the lake. My son’s eyes were wide when we were ordered to board the other boat. His hands were shaking as the Coast Guard radioed backup.

The interrogations took hours. Flares were thrown, divers were called, but not a single shred of evidence was found that pointed toward a drowned woman where we’d been. In the end, the Coast Guards assumed that, if there had been a body, we’d seen it as the last of the gases from within escaped and it had sunk, afterward, like a stone to the bottom of the lake where nothing short of a pilotless mini-sub could reach. We were told to leave and, under no circumstances, to return to that site. We left without a word.

Since my son’s departure for college, I have told this story a thousand times, and not a single fact has been changed. But there is still one thing that keeps me awake at night – the same thing that forced me to sell the cottage shortly after the events described above. Something didn’t seem right. Something had been off. And I am plagued by the thought that maybe, just maybe, we weren’t the only thing fishing out there that day – and that the splash and the woman were no more than bait cast by a bigger, hungrier thing.

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