The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - By Laird Barron Page 0,27

upon the small, sharp rocks of the beach, and after Karla shoved the others aside and administered first aid until she spluttered and vomited and breathed on her own, Bernice tried to summon an image of the form she’d seen down there, to perfect its features, and couldn’t. Even now, safely ashore and encircled by her comrades, the blurry figure was etched in her mind, and evoked a stark and abiding fear. It had come close, radiating a cold much sharper than the chill water. She squeezed her eyes shut, and rubbed them with her palms in a futile attempt to exorcise this image that had leaked from dreams into the physical world.

Dixie and Li-Hua implored her to go to the clinic. What if she was hypothermic? Bernice shrugged them off—after she regained her senses and hacked the water from her lungs, she felt fine. Weak and shivery, but fine. Lourdes was okay, too, probably better, insomuch as youth seemed to bounce back from anything short of bullet wounds. She huddled with Bernice, eager to relate her tale of near disaster. Her pants cuff had snagged on the rail and she banged her shoulder. Thank the stars for Aunt Bernice and Dixie!

“Guess I owe you one, too,” Bernice said as Dixie wrapped her in a blanket and led her to the cabin.

“Not me,” Dixie said. “No way I coulda dragged your carcass all the way in on my own. You should’ve seen Karla go—that old broad can swim!”

6.

Karla and Li-Hua suggested pulling stakes and heading home early in light of the traumatic events. Lourdes disappeared outside and Dixie lay in her bunk, inconsolable for cajoling her friends to accompany her on the rickety boat and then nearly getting them all drowned. “I really fouled up,” she said. Her voice was rusty from crying into her pillow. “What a jerk I am.”

“We should sue the pants off the lodge for owning such a damned leaky boat!” Karla’s had huffed and puffed her indignation for a good hour.

“We took the boat without asking, didn’t we?” Li-Hua said.

“That’s beside the point. It’s outrageous to keep a death trap lying around. Somebody should give them what for.”

Bernice forced herself to rise and go for a walk down to the beach where she smoked a cigarette and watched the sun rise while the moon yet glowed on the horizon. She stubbed the butt of her cigarette on the sole of her shoe. Her eyes were twitchy and dry and her hair was stiff. She shook her fist at the lake, and spat.

Lourdes stepped from the bushes screening the path and came to stand beside her. The girl’s expression was different today, more sober; she’d aged five years overnight. The patronizing half smile was wiped from her face. “That is the coldest water I’ve ever jumped into,” she said. “I dreamt about this before.”

“You mean the boat sinking?” Bernice couldn’t look at her.

“Kind of. Not the boat; other stuff. We were somewhere in the woods— here, I guess. Me, you, some other people, I don’t remember. You kept telling the story about Dolly.”

“Except I didn’t tell the story. Dixie did. She’s always been better at talking.”

“I got it wrong. Dreams are funny like that. Mom thinks I’m a psychic. Maybe I’m only a partial psychic.”

“Your psychic powers convince you to fly over here?”

Lourdes shrugged. “I didn’t really analyze it. I just wanted to come see you. It may sound dumb, but on some level I was worried you might be in trouble if I didn’t. Looks like I had it backwards, huh?”

Bernice didn’t say anything for a while. She watched the water shift from black, to milk, to gold. “I’ve always had a bit of the sight, too,” she said.

“Really?”

“Sometimes, when I was a child, I dreamed things before they happened. Nothing big. I sure couldn’t pick lotto numbers or anything. It came and went. I don’t get it so much these days.”

“Wow. Thanks for telling me. Mom doesn’t want to know anything. I confided in her once. Frank put his foot down.”

They fell silent and lighted cigarettes. Bernice finished hers. She hesitated, then patted Lourdes’s shoulder, turned and walked back to the cabin.

After breakfast at the Bigfish, their mood thawed, and by mid afternoon everyone agreed to stay—anything less was an unreasonable waste of what promised to be fine weather and several as yet corked bottles of wine.

Indeed, the remainder of the visit was splendid. By day, they set up a badminton net and a