Silver and Blue / Avery Martin

Silver and Blue

Avery Martin

The ring slipped off my finger when I jumped into the water, attempting a cannonball to impress a girl named Emily who intrigued and annoyed me in almost equal parts. It wasn’t a precious ring, just a thin band of silver without any stones, but it had belonged to my grandmother. As I watched it tumble through the dark blue water I was filled with an impossible need to retrieve it. Emily forgotten, I filled my lungs and ducked below the surface, following the mossy cable that anchored the dock as it snaked down to the bottom of the lake. The end was tied to a broken cinder block, also lush with algae and wedged between stones. I picked over these rocks, rounded by centuries of currents, one at a time, smoothing my fingers over each and lifting the looser ones to look in the cracks beneath, until I ran out of air. I returned to the surface, bursting into the air and drawing a deep breath. My legs beat the water as I considered my options. I had to find the ring. The bottom of the lake wasn’t too deep around the raft, only fifteen feet or so, and the cinder block made a useful landmark. Remembering the search patterns drilled into my head at junior lifeguard camp the summer before, I felt more assured. I flipped to my stomach and pulled a few strong arm strokes – one, two – then angled my torso downward and lifted my legs above me, allowing their weight to propel my body down into the cool blue. This lake isn’t like most lakes. Or maybe it is, just exaggerated to the point of absurdity. Picture a mountain lake in your mind – a big one. Now picture one bigger, deeper, bluer, colder. Deeper still. 1,645 feet deep at its deepest, in fact, and clear enough to see fifty feet down. Deep enough that they say that Jaques Cousteau went on a single expedition below its calm

surface and reported that “the world is not ready to know” what lay in its depths. This raft floated in the tamer shallows, but cold currents still swirled across my skin and twisted the rough cable like a whip through molasses. The temperature seemed to drop with each rock I inspected as I made my way in a thorough spiral out from the rope. I kept my eyes open, hoping for a glimpse of silver The prospectors who first invaded these mountains were here for silver too. They laid railways, fished and hunted the cutthroat trout and wild hare, blasted through the mountains and the lives of the Washo people, clear-cut piñon forests for lumber to support their boom towns. The story of this lake is a violent one, of course, like every story of this country. They say the lake holds this violence close, preserves it. There is some certain depth in the lake, with some certain combination of temperature and pressure, where a body doesn’t decompose. No bacteria can survive there, nothing that will eat flesh and fart out gas and float a body back to the surface. At this certain depth, hundreds of feet below the fishing boats and kayaks and jet skis, they say there is a layer of human bodies, preserved perfectly by the cold or perhaps crushed and shrunken by the pressure. Floating. Waiting. But the lake is too deep, and too wide, and too cold, for anyone to grab a frozen hand and pull them to the top where the light penetrates. My chest should have been bursting by the time I had spiraled my way out to a few yards from the rope that anchored me to the surface, but I was strangely comfortable. I could have noticed, in retrospect, that this wasn’t normal. I was a lifeguard and a swimmer but my lung capacity has never been anything to brag about. But I was focused on the task at hand, inspecting each gap between slippery stones that my fingers explored, searching for silver. The water held me cold and close as I made my way in circles, swimming parallel to the rocky floor. I shivered,

and maybe it was the sound of my own teeth grinding within my skull amplified by miles of water but I swear I heard a scream echoing through the deep blue. I froze, a rock clutched in one palm, the other hand pressed into the lake bed to hold me steady against the currents. It came again, a sharp cry distorted by the water. it reverberated through the water around me and terrified me.

Every year at that camp was an intense combination of peace and terror. When I closed my eyes and sucked the air into my lungs, breathing in pine and sagebrush, my mind quieted and my heartbeat slowed. But it’s hard to feel at home at church camp when your head keeps echoing with “I don’t know if I believe in God” and “Maybe I’m bisexual” and “Sometimes I want to die.” I was awkward, stuck between kid and teenager, all scraped knees and too many limbs for my own good, but Emily and the other girls who I called my friends let me join them as they gathered in the dark on the cement floor of our cabin to tell ghost stories. Many were boring, tales we’d all heard before. One, though, passed down from camper to camper, stuck with all of us. It went like this: One night, many years ago, a little boy walked out of his cabin at night after the sun had set because he wanted to go swimming. He misjudged the distance between his cabin and the stairs down the bluff to the beach and veered off the path in the darkness. He ran through the birch trees above the cliff, thinking he was heading for the steps to the water, but instead he ran straight off the edge, into the open air above the rocks and waves below. The counselors found his drowned body crushed against a boulder the next morning. If you wander too close to the birch grove at night, the story goes, you can still hear him screaming, immortalized at the moment he realized that there was no longer ground beneath his feet.

A few years after the last time I heard that story, we buried a baby under those birches. I was an acolyte, robed in white, struggling to stand steady under the weight of the brass cross I held overhead. It was fall and the wind blew cold onto the bluff from the water. His mother, a priest, was the first to cry, and most of the altar party followed soon after. The cantor tried to hold the key of the hymn in spite of the rushing wind and the tears and each person took turns to dust a handful of earth over the tiny grave. It looked too small to be real, I almost didn’t believe a baby would fit in such a little hole. I never asked his mother if she knew the story about the boy in the birches.

The birch grove was hundreds of yards away but the sound brought that story immediately to my mind. Panicked and suddenly desperate for air, I planted my feet on the rocks below me and pushed myself upward, frantically kicking towards the light. I sucked in a breath and found the raft, further from me than I expected. My arms splashed violently as I sprinted towards it. I hauled my body out of the water, the plastic mini-golf turf that covered the top of the raft leaving stinging patches of rug burn across my stomach. Emily raised her head from where she lay sunning herself, annoyed. “You splashed me,” she said. Between breaths I gasped out, “Sorry.” This seemed to satisfy her, and she closed her eyes and lay back, water droplets drying across her pale stomach. As I caught my breath, I tried to seem unbothered, although she wasn’t paying any attention to me. My heartbeat slowly calmed. The sun was shining, the sky was blue. Kids still splashed by the shallow buoys. Counselors sat on the rocks, gossiping. The tops of my shoulders warmed in the sun and I shook off my discomfort. It was a beautiful day, I was a strong swimmer and a brave sixth grader; my ring was down among the rocks and it would be silly to leave it there when I could just dive down and pick it up.

Five years after that summer I returned to the camp as a counselor. The lake was still as majestic, the trees as tall and inviting, but I could see then that I wasn’t the only one who felt out of place. The first day of a session, as kids reclaimed cliques and chased each other around the chapel and dragged suitcases out of cars and up the dusty hill to the cabins, a mother pulled me aside. Her daughter Alisha, she said, was here for the first time. She was here because her older brother had loved the camp and he had been murdered a year before. This week was to be a healing experience, her mother told me, to make her feel closer to him Alisha cried often, and I was the only person she’d talk to when she was sad. She’d slip her sticky little hand into mine and choke out between sobs, “I miss him,” and I’d rub her turtle shell of a back and wish desperately that I could do something for her pain. Sometimes I could convince her to join the group for a game or a story and sometimes she’d just cling to my hand and watch, but she never went swimming. She got dressed for the beach with the other girls, the whole flock of them in brightly colored bathing suits and flip-flops, but when we walked them all down the cement stairs to the sand she always stayed sitting on the bottom step. She wouldn’t walk out onto the rocks, never joined the ritual of picking over the beach for a flat enough spot to lay a towel. I didn’t ask her why she didn’t like the water. One night she woke me in the dark with a tap to my sleeping bag, her round face hovering just inches away from mine, and pointed wordlessly to her own cot. She had wet the bed. We quietly peeled up her sheets, tip-toeing through the cabin. I asked her to help me and her quivering bottom lip stilled, determined. We each held one end of the bundle of blankets and picked our way down the path to the laundry room and the spare sleeping bags, silent together under the stars.

Alisha didn’t last the week. Her homesickness was too strong, her grief too fresh to face in a group of strangers. Her brother died far away in Vegas but too much of him was there at the lake for her to meet alone. Back on the raft, I set my jaw and slipped back into the water, careful not to splash Emily as I did so. The lake welcomed me back, sucking my body down into its cold embrace with a satisfied gulp. I swam a sloppy breaststroke to the place where my search had left off and sculled there for a moment as I got my bearings, pushing down the dread that threatened to spill out of my stomach. A deep breath in, a few overhead strokes – one, two – and I kicked my legs into the air. The fear in my gut was a lead weight pulling me down to the bottom. I hovered just over the lakebed, looking for a landmark that would orient me to the areas I had already examined and those I hadn’t. At the murky edge of my vision I thought I saw a flash of silver. Unease forgotten, I pulled my body towards it, hand over hand on the rocks below me. The raft and the shore slipped away behind me as I flowed through the water towards this glint in the darkness. It seemed to grow further away the closer I came, but then again, distances always contract and expand underwater. Try it sometime: stand in a stream, look down at the landscape around your toes, and pick out a spot on the bottom. Remember that spot, really burn it into your brain, lean down and stare at it, then close your eyes and splash your hand into the water to touch it. You’ll always miss. Location is more of a suggestion down there than a fact. As I swam closer to the glimpse of silver I thought I’d seen, my muscles tensed in the cold. I was determined to reach it. The hum of miles of boats and fish and currents, usually muted at this depth, pounded in my ears. The water pressed in, crowding me with clammy hands. My gaze narrowed, focused only on the shiny metal ahead of me. I didn’t notice that the

rocks I pushed myself forward off of were getting softer, smoother, less solid. I didn’t notice when the algae became finer, longer, tangled strands instead of spongy vegetation. The thing that finally broke my concentration was the movement of a jaw, hinging open under my hand as I propelled myself forward off of it. I wrenched my eyes away from the beckoning glimmer ahead of me to look, terror rushing up from the pit of my stomach. My body reacted before my mind could unravel what I was seeing. My feet shoved into a sickeningly soft mass, launching me upward. My arms and legs beat the water. By the time my mind caught up I was breaking the surface, choking, thrashing towards the shore. Each stroke of my arms sprayed water into my eyes but I refused to put my head down into the lake. My heartbeat thrummed in my ears and my arms felt like jelly but I didn’t slow until I reached the shore, ran across the beach without a thought for how badly the stones would bruise my feet, and collapsed onto the safe haven of the bottom stair. The surface of the lake stretched into the distance, my ring vanished below it. Emily, still lying on the raft, removed her sunglasses and rolled over to tan her back. Crawdads burrowed between pebbles. And some distance away, refracted by water and time, a jaw slowly recoiled to rest, nestled in a tangle of arms and legs and torsos.