The Girl Who Could Breathe Under Water by Erin Bartels

Author:Erin Bartels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction;Suspense fiction;Thrillers (Fiction);FIC042100;FIC044000;FIC019000
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

19

I avoided your house for a solid week, but I couldn’t avoid thinking of you.

We used to make plans to run away together. To pack a couple bags, steal some food and some money, and head off on foot toward the train tracks that carried stacks of logs downstate and, ostensibly, out of Michigan at some point.

“We’ll just slip into a boxcar and take the train to, I don’t know, Tennessee or something,” you said, “then switch to one going west.”

“How far west are we going?”

“I dunno. Montana? It looked nice in that River Runs Through It movie.”

I nodded. “Then we can live in a cabin in the mountains.”

“Yeah, and we can open an animal sanctuary and have horses and goats and pets nobody wants anymore.”

Where we would find this cabin and how we would pay for the upkeep of all these animals were not things we concerned ourselves with. We only wanted escape. Or maybe not even escape as much as the prospect of it. I didn’t really understand why you wanted to run away, but I knew why I did.

Had you finally done it? Simply jumped onto a train and disappeared? Did you just need some space and time to work something out? Or had something terrible happened to you? I followed trains of thought until I’d built up terrifying scenarios in my mind, trying to convince myself that if I thought of them, they couldn’t be happening in real life. If I could create some dreadful fiction for you, the facts would turn out to be tame and commonplace. You’d turn up at the lake one day soon, fresh from backpacking across Europe, and have a good laugh at all the fuss that we’d made of you.

In the meantime, I doggedly tapped away at my laptop, determined not to waste my exile. What was a stupid critical letter in the face of all that was happening? The pages were racking up, and slowly my confidence was returning. Characters appeared, spoke, filled in their own particular backstories at opportune times. I conjured none of them. Each existed already on some other plane, and I was left to simply draw away the veil that had obscured them. Scene led inexorably to scene. This event caused that, that conversation revealed this, and I trembled a little to think that at any moment I might lose my grip on this mystical curtain and it would fly back into place.

If the mornings were magical acts of staying out of my own way, the nights were spent in anguished and exacting deliberation as I meticulously combed through my memories of those last few summers on Hidden Lake, searching for evidence to exonerate myself in your mother’s critical eyes.

Yes, there had been increasing distance between you and me—there always is between people who have been friends from a young age as each grows into her own self, which might be a self that neither anticipated on those warm summer nights when they had pledged

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