Despite the sharp cold, the water
was not deep—my good fortune. And even
better fortune? Moments after I hit the
water and heard the splash beside me, I heard Harriet’s cry: “Vickie! Are you there? Vickie!”
She’d been catapulted overboard, too.
I answered, and we quickly found
each other in the dark and the cold, my hand gripping hers with a grateful
fierceness. “We’re close to the shore,”
I said. “Just wade forward.” She mumbled a reply. Behind us, we could hear voices from the Don Juan.
“We hit a *** rock!”
“Let’s head back … we don’t want to
sink out here.”
“Where are those two stupid girls?”
“They probably ran below.”
And we heard the Don Juan pull away, its revving engines
drowning out our feeble cries for help.
My headache, still raging, seemed it
would crack my head open like a walnut, but holding Harriet’s hand did have a
calming effect. We splashed to the shore
and noticed immediately the shrieks of the cormorants and the biting odor of
their droppings. And then the rain
began—a piercing freezing rain that felt like shards of glass hitting our heads
and skin. “Let’s try for the old
lighthouse,” I said. “It should be
straight ahead, on the opposite side of the island.”
“Clear across the island!” Harriet
cried. “We’ll never—”
“It’s not that far,” I said. “Only about a quarter-mile across—like a
couple of blocks at home.”
Harriet mumbled. And we stumbled into the foul-smelling woods,
our only good fortune being a strange light in the air once we got away from
the shore. I warned Harriet to be on the
lookout for caves and cenotes.[i]
“What’s a cenote?”
“Like a sinkhole,” I said. “Filled with water. There are some here—I read about them.” I felt Harriet slow beside me.
As we moved farther inland, shivering
and frightened, I could feel the air brightening, my headache weakening. But the glassy rain still seemed to want to
shred us. And then, just ahead, I could
see through the trees the silhouette of the ruins. We were approaching from the back of the old
stone structure. When it was new—in
1864—it was a large stone house, with the stone tower attached in the front,
facing the lake. But now—abandoned since
1926—it was falling in on itself.
Collapsing like a bad plan.
We increased our speed and entered
the ruin. And the moment we did so, the
cormorants went silent, the rain stopped.
And all the sounds in the world had fallen away. What remained? A reeking, death-like smell, far worse than
what the cormorant droppings could possibly have caused.
“What are we going to do?” Harriet
whispered.
“I guess we wait to make sure the
rain’s stopped, then head back to the shore and try to signal a boat. I don’t see what else we can do.”
We moved to the front of the
building, to the old tower where the light had warned sailors for many years.
“That’s strange,” I said, looking
at the stairs.
“What is?”
“These steps have been repaired recently,”
I said.
And then we heard the awful sound from
above.
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