She begins rowing very quickly from the spot, one Mama? after another floating up to the surface of the lake behind her, a school of his cries desperately swimming after her. Glancing over her shoulder she can see them. She begins weeping in a hysteria that keeps time with her rowing, until she’s rounded the bend of the Chateau X and can’t see the spot anymore behind her. She cries all the way back across the lake to her house.
~ ~ ~
That night her uterus explodes in a tantrum of blood. Hunched over the toilet she feels the presence of Kristin, her other self whom she so rejected for abandoning their son: Lulu Blu, she hears Kristin whisper from the hallway, you’re no better. Worse, actually, she goes on, I left him in the gondola that night because I was afraid for him. Now he waits on the Other Side (the century’s uterus exploding in a tantrum of water) and you leave him there again, afraid for yourself. Lulu sobs no, her womb answers a red yes, she crawls back to the mattress to paint the dreams mapped there with the scarlet of her thighs.
Once not long after Kirk was born, back when she was still Kristin, she offered God a deal. Whatever good things might be in her future, she would trade them all just for her boy to be all right. She would trade them all. She would trade every minute of happiness, every minute of fulfillment, every minute of accomplishment, all those minutes for his well-being. And then when she lost him, she thought it was God answering, No. God had it in for her, and He had gotten back at her through a helpless child, Sniveling Coward that He had always been, the Neighborhood Bully who pulls the wings off angels simply to prove He can.
And then this notion occurred to her, she didn’t know why. This notion occurred to her; she thought what if in fact she and God had make this deal — but sometime in the future? At some point in the years to come that she doesn’t know, that she never can have foreseen, because it’s a future that’s never going to come to pass, what if God took her up on her deal and in fact they’re now living out the bargain? She has been stripped of happiness, stripped of fulfillment, stripped of whatever it is she might have accomplished, so that she might be guilty, lonely, haunted by the woman she once was who now despises her: but her boy lives. Her boy waits at this very minute on another lake not so different from this one, afraid, confused, but still alive.
In her sleep she smells smoke, feels the heat.
In her sleep another song-serpent — did she leave the radio on? — hisses in from the past. In her sleep it crawls through the front door, and somewhere in the front room catches fire. Maybe because some part of her brain knows that a dream rarely has a scent (she smells the smoke) and rarely a touch (she feels the heat), she wakes. She sits up in bed slowly at first, then startled to complete consciousness by the smoke that begins to choke her. Seeing the fire, she sees herself as others have seen her, in her arrogant red dress against the blue of the lake, a red flame floating on the water. By then the fire is in the hallway where Kristin stood whispering to her a few hours before. For what seems to her an absurdly long moment, she sits on her red dreamsoaked mattress looking at the flames just beyond the door, then shakes herself from her inertia and leaps to the floor, only to realize it’s too late.
Did she leave a candle burning? Did someone sail by and toss in a torch, because it was time to burn the heretic Madwoman in Red from the hills? What’s that phenomenon, she thinks to herself, where people burst into flames? The house spontaneously combusts, its fuse lit at the end that curls into a house’s subconscious. Was the house committing suicide in a symphony of self-immolation — an act of protest, like a Buddhist monk? She can imagine nothing to be protested unless, of course, it’s her presence. Unless, of course, the house means to burn away the human mark of its disgrace.
She’s beset by more responses than she can sort through in the moments the fire allows her. Somewhere in the ember-blizzard of these responses is calm; she feels it somewhere beyond the heat, before the calm is finally interrupted by a now rather ragged instinct for self-preservation, which itself transforms to panic. The daze of her sleep finally succumbs to adrenaline. She goes to the window of her bedroom only for the sill to fracture into flame, and then the curtains go up; she leaps back from them. The inferno drops to the floor on a parachute of fire, then the floor goes up in flames. Then the bed goes up. Now smoke drops her to her knees. For a thoughtless moment she reaches to one of the bed’s blankets, itself engulfed, so as to cover herself, before she drops it and retreats. But there’s nowhere to retreat.
Perhaps it’s this that accounts for it. Perhaps it’s her abject helplessness, perhaps it’s that she finally has nowhere to go and so surrenders to the End. Or perhaps it has nothing to do with her, perhaps it’s a fluke of nature
but the lake begins to rise
after having not risen at all in months. It now rises very suddenly and visibly, by inches.
At first she thinks the house must be sinking. As if somewhere nearby a dam burst; but there is no dam; it’s a tide as mysterious as the intricate flow of her womb that manifested itself to her in the sky over Port Justine the afternoon before. Perhaps the lake comes so that it might claim Lulu before the fire can — so it has nothing to do with rescue, everything to do with possessiveness … but for whatever reason, the lake comes up over the edge of the front porch, comes through the front door into the front room, comes into the hallway of ghosts and into the bedroom and rises up around her feet then her ankles lapping at the flaming walls around her. It brings with it a spray, Lulu’s private rain. It’s now her private lake, beneath her private sky.
The lake that was her enemy. The lake that was my fear. The lake that was the afterbirth of her dreams. The lake that preyed on my son. Now comes as ally, confessor, co-conspirator, savior.
It stops about the time it gets to her waist.
She doesn’t move, partly caught in the shock between the heat of the fire that’s given way to the cold of the water. She keeps throwing water in her face to get the stinging of the smoke out of her eyes; she doesn’t move, as if not to tempt either the lake or the house of ashes around her, until a wall suddenly gives way behind her, falling away; and she sees the lake has dropped to her thighs.
It likes her thighs and stays awhile.
Peering off in the dark where the wall has collapsed, she sees bobbing flashlights on the hillside that abutted what once was her house, and she finally dares to move toward the dark, walking up out of the water onto the new beach.
“You all right?” she hears a stranger ask in the dark, some guy she recognizes as living on the hillside above her, with his son at his elbow, only a few years older than Kirk would be now. His flashlight shines in her face until she shields her eyes with her arm. Beyond him she can now make out others on the embankment in the dark, watching: “What happened?” someone says to someone else nearby, as a woman comes up to Lulu and wraps a blanket around her. “You should get out of those clothes,” the stranger with the boy suggests, and is startled when Lulu, in a daze, drops her red dress from her body to the ground; she pulls the blanket around her and stands shivering for a while.
“You have anywhere to go?” the woman who gave her the blanket asks in the dark.