Lulu stands naked in her blanket shivering. She’s dazed enough she doesn’t register the question at first, but studies the wreckage and looks for the gondola to see if it survived. Does she have anywhere to go? the same woman asks someone else; and in the dark Lulu sees, floating silver among the black remnants of the house, the gondola. Yes, she says. I have somewhere to go.
~ ~ ~
There’s no convincing any of them, she knows, that she’s not who she’s always been in their eyes, the Madwoman in Red, even if she’s now dropped her red dress to the mud of the new shore and stands naked in the blanket. The world’s never been as casual about my nakedness as I am. When she turns to go back into the lake, a couple of people try to stop her — the woman who brought her the blanket, the man with his son — assuming she’s in some kind of shock; as calmly as possible she explains she’s quite coherent but has to retrieve the gondola. It’s imperative she save the gondola. They help her pull the gondola up onto the new embankment and tie it to a tree.
They think I started the fire, she realizes, they think I meant to go up in flames with the house. Later, when they want to take her to a shelter out in the Valley, she says no I’m staying near the water, and when she looks at the lake, the lake looks back. Are we sisters now? Lover and lover, wife and wife, wife and mistress, mistress and slave? The lake, she’s still thinking to herself hours later, sleeping on the living room floor of the woman with the blanket, saved me tonight … for what? Does it have a conscience? I thought it came for my son five years ago … did it really take me instead, and I’m just now realizing it? Lying in the dark she tries to remember now as clearly as she can what happened five years ago when she sank down through the water, Kirk’s gondola above her head, but I can’t. Is it the same lake at all? Or was the lake that came for my son the twin sister of the lake whose shores I’ve known the five years since, the lake that saved me tonight? This lake she rises from the floor in the dark of the stranger’s living room and walks to the window, staring out at the night and the glitter of moonlight on the water in the distance where her house was this lake that covets me and Lulu somehow resists the almost overpowering compulsion to run outside the house right now and down the banks to the gondola.
For a moment she’s overwhelmed. She grabs the windowsill to steady herself because she almost comprehends the huge unmeasurable love of it, the lake’s sacrifice in saving her so that it could then give her up. Saving me so I could have one more chance … and go back. She whispers in the dark through the window, You would do that for me? You would give me up so I could go back? You would do that because you love me that much, and therefore you know what it’s like for me to love my son that much? You would do that for him, because you know what he means to me?
For a moment there’s nothing but silence, and then in the night the lake answers.
She has the almost overpowering compulsion to rush to the gondola even in the dark; and realizes that in part it’s because she’s afraid if she waits then she’ll fail herself again, and fail her son again as she did the afternoon before. But as soon as that realization comes, it passes: she knows she won’t fail again. And knowing that, she returns to her place on the floor and, against the hard wood beneath her, finally sleeps.
~ ~ ~
In her sleep, the red sky stretches across the dome of her inner lids.
When she opens her eyes, she hears voices from outside the window. She turns on her side and pushes herself up from the floor, walks to the window and looks out; the sky is ablaze with blood. All along the road, down the embankment that leads to the lake, people stand in their blue clothes looking up at the clotted clouds. She looks herself for only a minute, looks around the house for her red dress and finds it nowhere: so she steps naked from the front door and walks down the hill to the water, astounded witnesses diverted from the astounding sky by the astounding woman who passes.
As she passes, someone reaches out to her as if to help or stop her. But she isn’t stopped. A crowd at the beach parts for her as she moves through them to the tree where the gondola is tied. She unties the gondola from the tree and, holding the rope in her hand, looks at the sky again to assess the storm. She pushes the gondola out in the water and gets in, and takes the pole.
The last vision the lake shows her is a vision of herself again, except she’s changed places with it. This time rising from the lake and stepping from the black atrium of an underwater geyser, among the cinders of her house that still float on the lake’s surface like slivers of ice from a black arctic, is Lulu; that’s when the naked woman in the gondola knows she’s Kristin again. She continues to watch as the vision of Lulu slowly recedes in the distance, getting smaller and smaller with all the other people on the shore that now gets farther and farther away. Lulu raises her hand in farewell and Kristin nods in farewell back, continuing to push herself out into the water with the pole.
As she pushes the gondola by pole along the edge of the lake, people run alongside. The farther she sails, the bigger the crowd becomes, mesmerized by the spectacle of the nude woman with the pole guiding her silver gondola. After a while Kristin pushes herself beneath the inverted arc of the fallen line of the sky tram, then around the bend where the Chateau X rises up out of the water. Off to her right in the southwest she can see the Hotel Hamblin. She feels calm unlike the afternoon before when she took this same trip. Accompanying her are the melody-snakes loosed last night from her house by the fire; now homeless they slither alongside the gondola as the growing throng of observers run alongside on land. She can hear them as they brush past her, women’s voices in the lake crossing her path as if daring her to cut them in two in her image, and then there’s a school of them, all the voices she’s heard for five years, some she didn’t even know were singing to her, now slipping back and forth across her path darting across her passage as if to either clear the way or stop her, because they can’t stand to lose her, not to the lake that’s now her sister or lover or mother. Beneath the hemorrhaging sky, the snakes just beneath the water’s surface reflect red strings of blood.
The crowd on land grows. Stragglers along the shore are caught up by the others following her, until by the time she rounds the Chateau and approaches the lake’s origin there appear to be several hundred onlookers, including people who before now have never heard of the Madwoman of the Lake. No one calls or heckles, everyone is quiet. Soon Kristin puts down the pole and takes the oars to row, and as she approaches the spot she drops the oars and allows herself to drift to it, as if trusting the boat’s precision more than her own. The melody-snakes that have followed her relentlessly for the last quarter of a mile have stopped at an unseen but unbreachable border, out of earshot of the past, muted into invisibility by the lake’s hush. Kristin peers over the side of the boat. Zed is blacker and emptier than it’s ever been. Kristin looks up for a moment at the shore of the northern Laurel Bay which is now lined with people. No one calls to stop her. In the red glare from water and sky she can just make out some people holding their hands over their eyes. It’s perfectly quiet, not a voice or a song to be heard and
Wildman?
she says, leaning over the gondola. She doesn’t shout it, she lets it fall from her mouth and watches it sink. It vanishes into the pitch black of the lake and she waits. Seconds pass. A minute. Another minute and another, and then, in the pitch black where she watched her question disappear, she sees the approach of its answer. Slowly it grows before her eyes, floating up to her until it breaks the surface