Daughters of the Lake(30)

She had but one request on her deathbed. “Bury me at sea,” she whispered to Marie just days before she died. “Don’t put me in the ground. I don’t belong there. I want to go back into the water.”

“You don’t want to be buried next to Father?” Marie’s eyes stung as she quickly blinked away the tears.

Vivienne shook her head. “He’s not in the ground, child. That’s just the shell of his body. Your father is waiting for me, beyond. The reunion . . .” Her words evaporated into a deep sigh as she smiled, imagining it.

A burial at sea was not the Christian thing to do, but it was her mother’s last wish, and Marie was determined to carry it out. So she and Marcus huddled together and came up with a plan. When the time came, they would tell the townspeople that, sick as she was, Vivienne had asked to make one last trip to their former home to see family and friends. Marcus and Marie would take her in Marcus’s fishing boat, and, as far as the townspeople in Great Bay were concerned, Vivienne would perish on the trip. Meanwhile, Marcus and Marie would take her mother’s body for one last sail, way out into the vastness of the lake.

Late one autumn afternoon, Vivienne called her daughter to her bedside. “It’s time,” she managed to say. “Take me down to the lake, child.”

“But, Maman,” Marie protested, holding a cool cloth to her mother’s fevered brow. “You should rest here, in bed.”

Vivienne just shook her head. “I want the last sight I see in this life to be the water.”

So Marcus scooped her out of her bed—she was nothing more than skin and bones by that point—and carried her down to the lake, Marie trailing close behind. As daughter sat with mother at the lakeshore, Marcus readied his fishing boat, hoisting its single sail and making a comfy nest out of blankets and pillows.

“What do you say we go for a ride, Vivienne?” He smiled so tenderly that Marie’s eyes stung with tears. He set her mother in the nest of blankets in the back of the boat, and Marie scrambled alongside her. In no time, they were off.

They sailed straight out into open water, aided by a gentle tailwind. The lake’s surface was as still as glass as they skimmed along. Marie held her mother’s hand and watched Marcus as he steered the boat, keeping a sharp eye on the horizon. As the setting sun illuminated the sky with fiery shades of purple, pink, and red, Marie thought: Maybe now is not the time. Maybe she will stay with us awhile longer. But it was not to be.

Vivienne’s eyes shone with tears, and a smile lit up her face. “Pierre,” she whispered, extending one trembling hand. Then she laid her head on her daughter’s shoulder, sighed deeply, and it was over. Or, for Vivienne, just beginning.

“Is she gone?” Marcus asked.

Marie held her mother’s wrist, but there was no pulse. She listened to her chest for a heartbeat but heard only silence. Her skin was already beginning to cool. There was no life left.

When they slipped Vivienne’s body overboard, Marie did not say a prayer, not a conventional one anyway. “Sleep well, Maman,” she said as she watched Vivienne’s body sink under the water’s glassy surface.

So the trunk sat, mostly forgotten, until something drew Marie to it again when Addie was a little girl. She hadn’t touched the trunk since her family had tucked it into that dusty corner, decades earlier. Was the book still there? Had it ever been? She’d opened the trunk and dug through the layers of linens until her hand hit something smooth and hard. She’d slipped the book under her apron and stolen back downstairs to the kitchen, where she’d put it in the drawer with her mother’s lace tablecloths.

Now it was time to read the old tale again.

“I’m sorry, Maman,” Marie whispered, “but this can’t stay hidden forever.” Then she watched out the window as the moonlight glistened on the lake until the sun’s first rays penetrated the darkness.

The next morning, after Marcus and his brother had headed onto the lake to gather up the day’s catch—it wouldn’t be too long before the encroaching ice ended their season for the year—Marie sat with her daughter in front of the fire in the living room.

“Do you remember your dream?” Marie asked.

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget it,” Addie said with a nod, shuddering. She drew a shawl around her shoulders, shielding herself from the cold she still felt within.

Marie waited for her daughter to continue, but she didn’t. Silence fell between them.

She held out the book to Addie. “It was written, or written down, you might say, by my grandmother. I think it’s time you read it.”

“Your grandmother?” Addie leaned forward. “Truly?”

“Truly.” Marie smiled, nodding in the direction of the book.

Addie grasped it and ran one hand along the soft leather cover. It smelled of the past somehow. She opened it and saw yellowed pages of faded, handwritten words. “The Daughter of the Lake,” she said, reading the title aloud. “Is this a storybook?”

“It is a storybook, yes. After you’ve read it, we’ll talk about what kind of story.”

Addie curled her legs up underneath her as her eyes settled on the first page, squinting to make out her great-grandmother’s spidery, purplish scrawl, and she began to read.

The Daughter of the Lake