Gina carried the ice cream cone to the water’s edge.
Right there, she saw herself in the algaed water, walking upside down holding a raspberry ice cream cone, and, next to her own water-image, another water-image, the sun this time. Gina walked into the water, out to where the algae dispersed, staring first at her diminishing reflection and then at the sun. It’d be interesting to go blind, she thought, people and seeing-eye dogs would take care of you and lead you through the rest of your life forever. You’d be on a leash. The dog would make all the big decisions. Then she noticed that when she walked into the water her images were sucked into it. As the water got deeper, there was less of you above it, as if you had gone on an instant diet. Okay, now that her legs had disappeared, you didn’t have to look at her legs, because they weren’t there anymore. Well, they were underwater, but the water was so dirty she couldn’t see them as well as she could see her reflection at the surface: of her waist, her head, her chest, the ice cream cone. She wished she were prettier, movie-pretty, but walking into the water was a kind of solution, watching your girl-image get all swallowed up, until there was no image left, just the water.
She held the ice cream cone above the water and then after another lick let it go as she went under.
Under the surface she held her breath as long as she could, and then she thought of Gordy Himmelman, and, sort of experimentally, she tried breathing in some water, just to see what it was like, and she choked. She felt herself panicking and going up to the surface but then she fought the panic when she imagined she saw somebody like Gordy Himmelman, though better-looking, more like her dad, under the water with her, holding her hand and telling her it was better down here, and all the problems were solved, so she tried to relax and breathe in a little more water. She registered thunderbolts of panic, then some peace, then panic. Then it was all right, and Family Day was finally over, and, because she wasn’t a very good swimmer anyway, she began to sink to the bottom, though there were all those annoying voices. She would miss Wilbur, the guinea pig, but not much else, not even the boys who had tried to feel her up.
She drifted down and away.
Her father and the lifeguard had seen the cone of ice cream floating on the surface of the lake at the same time. They both rushed in, and Gina’s dad reached her body first. He pulled her up, thrashed his way to the beach, where, without thinking, he gave his daughter the Heimlich maneuver. Water erupted out of her mouth. Gina’s eyes opened, and her father laid her down on the sand, and she said, “Gordy?” but what she said was garbled by the water still coming out of her lungs into her mouth and out of her mouth into the sand. As she came around, her hair falling around her eyes, she seemed disarrayed somehow, but pleased by all the fuss, and then she smiled, because she had seen her father’s face, smeary with love.
Fourteen
When she arrived back home, having survived her near-death experience, Gina was supposed to lie down, but she didn’t want to be horizontalized. She couldn’t see the point to it since she wasn’t particularly tired and she certainly wasn’t dead, either. Her throat hurt; that was about it. What she really wanted to do was to call a few people. She took her cell phone along with four cookies into her room, closed the door, and sat cross-legged on her bedspread with two of the cookies hidden beneath one knee and the other two cookies behind the other knee, and she wondered which of her friends she would call first to tell about her near-death. She was glad to see Wilbur again, scrabbling in his corner. He welcomed her back with a few quiet, loving little squeals.
She bit into the first cookie, leaving three and a half.
She decided to give her friend April the first call, but April wasn’t at home — nobody was (and they didn’t have an answering machine or voicemail over there, it was medieval) — so she tried Danni instead. Danni took it on the second ring. Danni did all the phone-answering at the Wiesiewski house. Danni was pretty and stuck-up like the rest of the Wiesiewskis, but she was a good listener when she had to be. When Danni asked Gina, “Whassup?” Gina told her that they’d been out at Copper Lake, and she’d been swimming, and — this was a secret, Danni absolutely could not tell anyone — she thought she saw this ghost-person under the water who looked exactly like Gordy Himmelman, and, no, she couldn’t describe how it had happened, but it was like he had dragged her down under the water, and it was incredibly beautiful down there — it was not ugly — and she almost drowned, but her father or somebody had brought her back to life.
Gordy Himmelman? Danni asked. You’re kidding. That freak? Besides, he’s dead. Are you crazy? What are you saying?
No. Gina said that she was not kidding, swear to God, and not crazy. Did she sound crazy? No. This was weirder than being crazy. In fact, she said, it would be just exactly like Gordy Himmelman to be a ghost, because when he was alive, or semi-alive, or whatever it was he had been when he had been living, he had always wandered into places where he wasn’t wanted, and it would therefore be like him now to show up here, there, and everywhere. She ate her cookie and bit into another one, which left two and a half. She touched her hair. It was still damp and probably dirty from the lake water. She would have to shampoo it soon.
It’s like he’s in charge of something real interesting, Gina said.
Danni asked Gina if she could tell anyone, and Gina said, well, no, not really, or: well, you can tell some people, but only as long as you get my permission first, and they have to promise not to tell. “I don’t want everybody to know,” Gina said. “It sounds too weird.”
Danni said she understood perfectly.
Within four days Gina’s telephone was ringing every half-hour from kids she knew who thought they had seen Gordy or someone like him: Ron Burr told Chrystal Chambers that he thought he had seen Gordy in the Elysian Fields Shopping Mall, walking as if he were battery-powered and under remote control from Mars, into one of the theaters at the multiplex, but when he followed him in, Gordy wasn’t there. He had just vanished like shit in a shitstorm. Ron said he was a loser. Losers disappear on you, but now that he was dead maybe he wasn’t such a total loser after all. Death could revise you. The day after that, April, Gina’s friend April Cumming, claimed that she had seen Gordy Himmelman outside her window, looking in, like some creep stalker jackoff; then ugly little Georgette Novak, who wanted to be popular and who worked at McDonald’s because people claimed that her parents wouldn’t give her an allowance for clothes, said that she had served Gordy Himmelman a Coke and fries, and that he looked verifiably dead, which at least was convincing, and he paid her with money that totally disappeared after she put it into the cash drawer. He had paid her with bogey money. Rona Elliott said she had seen him out in the park, where she had been walking her dog, Buster, who barked hysterically at him. Gordy stood on the other side of the park, waving at her, as if he were signaling. She turned away, and when she turned back, he was gone.
Other reports put Gordy in a tree, way up where you couldn’t reach him, Gordy moving around in the house at night, Gordy’s image appearing suddenly on the computer screen, Gordy calling in the middle of the night and asking for the time, Gordy appearing on a three-A.M. infomercial — in the background in a kitchen, staring at the camera, while in the foreground they were selling a kitchen gadget.
They said he looked like himself. They said he was everywhere.