Good Neighbors(82)

She forged ahead. They followed.

Deep water. The current dragged her and she ran-swam. So cold. Rushing sounds, and also a distant hum she couldn’t place—like the rhythmic shaking of trees in a heavy wind.

She felt the others splashing nearby. They arrived at a crevasse, through which all the water rushed. On a ledge, something reflected the flashlight. She picked up a depth gauge—that last, specially small diver must have left it. This must have been where the diver had stopped and given up. The crevasse was narrow and long and submerged under freezing water. Virgin territory, it was made for people with small hips and shoulders. People not yet fully grown. A part of the earth no human but Shelly had ever known.

The depth gauge read something impossible: 1,000 feet.

She’d read and heard that the deepest parts of the lowest Lloyd Aquifer went down 1,800 feet. Could Shelly be that far down? If the trained, professional adults hadn’t found her, how could they possibly do it?

Even as she reached her hands through the tight gap and held her breath, she understood that this was insane. Foolish and in some ways, selfish. But she couldn’t go back. She’d either surface with a body, or not at all.

She took the deepest of breaths, silently whispered the briefest of prayers (Please). Then underwater. Her arms went through first, catching purchase of soft rock. She tried to squeeze her head and shoulders through but had the angle wrong. She pulled back out. Breathed again. Submerged. Pushed through again. This time her head went first, tender and vulnerable to whatever waited on the other side.

Breath held, she wriggled. Everything felt tight, the surrounding walls of sand and tar and dirt unstable like they might crash down. Still holding her breath, still underwater, she pushed her shoulders. Easier. Then the rest. Small, child hips. She shimmied, bound tight as a worm, her shoulders doing the work. Sound took a long time to echo through water. She could feel life behind her—her friends. They felt so far away.

She burst through. Out! Her lungs still full of air, she went buoyant, carried by water to the top. She burst up, gasping into a wide-open space.

A current ferried her. She worked not to panic. Not to struggle and drown. Just to stay on her back, breathing, and let herself be carried, as surely Shelly must have been carried. She could see only with her hands and her breath, and the hairs on her arms.

The current brought her to an enclosed shallows where she was able to stand. The water rushed past her, knee deep. This was a kind of chamber. She could feel but not see the walls, the center where the water rushed and seemed to drain. There was a flapping; that tree sound in wind only much louder. The room oscillated, and in the dark, it was hard to tell what was happening.

One by one, the rest appeared. Phones recovered and wiped clean, they shined their lights, illuminating the enclosed crescent where everything above seemed to have dragged down. The shallow current rushed past the ledge and down, gathering depth as it pooled in the middle of the high-ceilinged room, a pile that moved. The water drained down.

She placed the rhythmic tree-shaking sound, at last. It was the sound from which the crescent had been bereft all summer. The sound that defined East Coast summer: cicadas. They’d swarmed down here, instead of above.

The movement, yes, the movement. This room was alive.

Ella shined her phone on a bird beside Julia’s sneaker, flapping its wings, trapped in tar. And then more phone lights. They lit up this closed, dead-end chamber and Julia could see hundreds of flapping things beneath the shallow stream, all trapped in dense tar: birds and squirrels and possums. Cicadas, too. Seventeen-year and thirteen-year broods and annuals. Every size and breed. They were stuck to the center pile and to the walls and even the ceiling by tar, their bodies glimmering.

Their death made a vibrating hum.

“Is she here?” Dave whispered. Julia turned and Dave Harrison, toughest kid in the Rat Pack, was wiping away tears. “Julia, we have to find her. I hate this place. She can’t stay here.”

Julia started wading, following the water to its deep unknown. She held her Hawaiian shirt and tried not to trample. Pretended these birds and squirrels and household pets were something else. Butterflies in cocoons, about to take flight on a great adventure. It was a field of them, beautiful and terrible.

The sound got louder. A living friction. The current drew her to its inevitable end where it drained, leaving just the living pile, as massive as a killer whale. Shivering and shaking and sick, she scanned the monstrosity. The rest shined their lights. They circled the pile, and yes, even climbed it, despite its wailing pain-song of flapping, mewing struggle.

Shelly.

It was Ella who discovered her on the opposite side of the pile, halfway up. She recognized her Free People skort. The Wildes’ funeral box lay open at her side, a harmonica and a necklace and a Robot Boy and blond hair spilled over her knees.

They had known, of course. There was no way she could have survived. But until now, they had not believed. Shelly Schroeder was dead.

Julia was the first to touch her and she was as cold as the water. The rest followed. They touched her, too, as if to warm her. They wiped away the oil and dirt. They cleaned her arms and legs and face—a thing they could never have done alone, and yet a natural thing to do together. She was cold and still and perfectly preserved. As haunted as she’d been on the morning of the fall.

Shelly Schroeder

Shelly Schroeder.

Shelly Schroeder.

I know what happened to you.