Beyond the Headlights by Allan Davis

Author:Allan Davis [Last, First name]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77180-579-7
Publisher: Iguana Books
Published: 2022-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Eric

Now the lake was perfectly calm, a flat blue in the late-afternoon sun that had moved away the clouds and cleared the sky. It didn’t look like any storm was coming. We set off. She was still not wearing a life jacket. After every three or four strokes, she stopped paddling and flexed the fingers of her injured hand.

She asked, “Have you ever wondered what it feels like to drown?”

Her voice seemed so pensive she could’ve been talking to herself. And why ask me this? Did she think that was what Julia must feel like right now?

“When I found my father, his eyes were still open, looking up at me.”

We were in the spot where Julia’s ashes should now be floating, if not on the surface then suspended halfway down, right below me. I leaned over and looked down to see if I could see her. Or maybe they were still airborne, and if I turned and looked up I would see her following me.

Aiyana stopped paddling to flex her fingers and rub her wrist. “My grandfather told me, in the old days in the winter, the Aboriginals took their dead out to the centre of Broken Deer Lake and left them on the ice because in the spring the currents would take them to the spirit world on the other side.”

“What other side?”

“Sometimes they’d find the bodies washed up on the shore when the ice melted. That meant they hadn’t gone to the spirit world yet, over the River Styx to the land of souls, and they needed to complete the ceremony.”

I stopped paddling, for a moment so convinced Julia had not sunk to the bottom or got picked up by any undercurrent but had washed up on shore that I almost called, “Where are you?” I couldn’t help it.

Aiyana continued. “After my father died, fell through the ice, I got nightmares that came from the other side. I’d look up and over the lake, thinking my father would be coming back any moment. Because whenever he waved goodbye, he always came back. But he didn’t come back. So I started looking for him for real when April came, when the ice was coming out, and one morning I saw that the ice was boiling up in one spot, so I was watching and waiting at that spot. As the ice began to drift, I followed the underwater currents; different currents are different colours under the ice. So I followed the currents and I found him washed up on shore, still frozen, his hands when I touched them ice cold. It was him, yes, but some other him, like there were two hims, with different-coloured faces, and the one I had found had no colour, like mushrooms. The one I remembered had lots of colour, like lots of energy. I didn’t understand. In early May the loons came back and every night I listened to their call coming from the other side, Where are you? Where are you? So I knew the other him was still out there, on the lake, calling for me from the other side.

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