The Storm King(90)

She swims the lake to become the better of the twins, but she also swims with the hope of discovering how a speck like herself can accomplish something that truly matters.

One day in April, the lake delivers her answer.

She first sees the thing as a flutter of shadow, as if the sun has blinked. The waters explode when it appears as a monolith not ten feet in front of her. The waves of its impact crash against her like a rebuke by the angriest of lovers.

It takes her a moment to understand that it’s a car.

For an instant, fear takes her and she peers at the faultless sky. If one car decides to fly off the top of a cliff, surely others might follow its example. Then she remembers that she isn’t entitled to be afraid anymore.

But it doesn’t make sense. A car in the lake.

Only the trunk is visible from the surface, so she dives to get a better look. The water is blistered with air bubbles, and it’s hard to see anything in detail. The front of the car is crushed. The windshield is a gaping mouth and the passenger-side door is crumpled like discarded paper.

A groan rises from the wreck as it lists toward her. The water churns as the car topples. She just manages to get out of the way as it crashes to the lake bed.

The passenger’s side is now pressed against the bottom of the lake, and the entire vehicle is underwater. A stain like tannin clouds the water. It billows from the front of the car. She can taste it in her mouth. Blood.

The driver’s door is also smashed. She tries to open it, but it’s impossible. The explosions of air bubbles that had pocked the water have thinned to tendrils that streak like spider’s silk. A child’s hand bobs, delicate and still, through the glass of the rear door. The horror of the sight sends her back to the surface.



She takes gasping bites out of the spring day. She’s afraid again, but this time it isn’t for herself.

When she plunges back under the surface, she makes for the rear door, but finds its handle locked or jammed. She pounds her fist against the glass, to no result but dull thuds sounding through the deep like the beat of a weak heart. Flesh and bone will not be enough.

She feels around the lake bed for a rock. By the time she finds one, her lungs are already aflame, but every second she takes for herself is one stolen from the child trapped in the car. Through the glass, thin limbs float blue in the dim light. A burst of short dark hair sways weightless in the cold water.

A boy.

It takes her four tries to break the window. There’s a moment of pure relief when the glass shatters into opacity like rimes of ice. But the window doesn’t dislodge. No matter how hard she batters it, it doesn’t budge.

The pain in her chest is insurmountable and she has no choice but to return to the surface. She pants into the bright sunshine. The day is perfect but corpses wait just below the lake’s calm surface. Only the long shadow of the Night Ship tempers the flawless day.

June would accept that the boy in the car below is dead, but she isn’t supposed to be June anymore. It would take every goon who ever worked the Century Room to drag May from this wreck.

One deep breath and she’s back underwater. She grabs the luggage rack to anchor herself, and stomps against the cracked glass with the heels of both feet and all the strength she has. Again and again and again.

Finally, something gives way. She swims down to probe the window with her fingers. There’s a small hole, a place where the glass has buckled. Using the rock, she resumes her assault on the weak point. The boy is out of time, but she isn’t going fail him. She’ll give him everything she has.

More hammering, until there’s a hole big enough for her bony hand to fit through. She reaches into the car and unlocks the door.



June didn’t believe in deities or prayers, but May had faith in a benevolent universe. She can feel May with her now, more than ever before. It’s May who tries the handle.

The door opens as smooth as the lake on a windless day. She grabs for the boy, forgetting about his seatbelt. His head bobs indifferently against hers as she reaches across him, the strands of his thick young hair tickling her neck. When she unfastens the belt, she gathers him into her arms like he’s her own son. Euphoria. Tears of unbounded joy.

After the agony of getting him out of the car, carrying him to the stone beach is easy. He’s taller than she is, but hardly weighs a thing.

When her feet touch the beach with the boy in her arms she feels as if she’s arrived on the shore of a new world where anything is possible.

It’s only when she lays the boy on the rocks and looks into his vacant eyes that she remembers that he’s dead.

His eyes are a shade of blue that is nearly iridescent. The eyes of a doll with a fanciful maker. The boy is dead, but his eyes are still bright. They are so bright that his skin seems transparent in comparison. His left arm is ruined, jagged like a shattered branch.

He’s as dead as the others in the car.

But May wouldn’t give up.

She pushes against his chest, using the CPR training she received when she first volunteered for the Red Cross. After compressions, she puts her lips against his and breathes her breath into his lungs. More compressions, more breaths. The exertions make her light-headed.

But May wouldn’t give up.

Under her lips, the boy twitches. She pulls away from him as he ejects a geyser of water onto the bed of smooth stones.

He lies back, coughing, and it’s like a switch is thrown. Color climbs his cheeks. Pupils constrict to pinpoints in the bright April sun. She thought they’d dazzled before, but now they glow. She’s never seen a boy like this one.