That was tonight.
Or foam
She shivered and looked at Katrina.
“Tell me what’s going on,” she said. “Please, Katrina. Maybe I can help you.”
Katrina just shook her head sadly. She mimed driving, hands around the invisible steering wheel again.
Amy sighed. She put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot. Katrina reached towards the radio, eyebrows raised quizzically. When Amy nodded, she turned it on and slowly wound through the stations until she got Newford’s WKPN—FM. It was too early for Zoe B.’s “Nightnoise” show, so they listened to Mariah Carey, the Vaughan Brothers and the like as they followed the highway east.
Neither of them spoke as they drove; Katrina couldn’t and Amy was just too depressed. She didn’t know what was going on. She just felt as though she’d become trapped in a Greek tragedy. The storyline was already written, everything was predestined to a certain outcome and there was nothing she could do about it. Only Matt could have, if he’d loved Katrina, but she couldn’t even blame him.
You couldn’t force a person to love somebody.
She didn’t agree with his need to protect his privacy. Maybe it stopped him from being hurt, but it also stopped him from being alive. But he was right about one thing: he couldn’t be held responsible for who chose to love him.
They crossed over the Dulfer River just as dawn was starting to pink the eastern horizon. When Amy pulled into the campgrounds, Katrina directed her down a narrow dirt road that led to the park’s boat launch.
They had the place to themselves. Amy pulled up by the water and killed the engine. The pines stood silent around them when they got out of the car. There was birdsong, but it seemed strangely muted.
Distant. As though heard through gauze.
Katrina lifted a hand and touched Amy’s cheek, then walked towards the water. She headed to the left of the launching area where a series of broad flat rocks staircased down into the water. After a moment’s hesitation, Amy followed after. She sat down beside Katrina, who was right by the edge of the water, arms wrapped around her knees.
“Katrina,” she began. “Please tell me what’s going on. I—”
She fussed in her purse, looking for pen and paper. She found the former, and pulled out her checkbook to use the back of a check as a writing surface.
“I want to help,” she said, holding the pen and checkbook out to her companion.
Katrina regarded her for a long moment, a helpless look in her eyes, but finally she took the proffered items. She began to write on the back of one of the checks, but before she could hand it back to Amy, a wind rose up. The pine trees shivered, needles whispering against each other.
An electric tingle sparked across every inch of Amy’s skin. The hairs at the nape of her neck prickled and goosebumps traveled up her arms. It was like that moment before a storm broke, when the air is so charged with ions that it seems anything might happen.
“What ... ?” she began.
Her voice died in her throat as the air around them thickened. Shapes formed in the air, pale diffused airy shapes, slender and transparent. Their voices were like the sound of the wind in the pines.
“Come with us,” they said, beckoning to Katrina.
“Be one with us.”
“We can give you what you lack.”
Katrina stared at the misty apparitions for the longest time. Then she let pen and checkbook fall to the rock and stood up, stretching her arms towards the airy figures. Her own body began to lose its definition. She was a spiderweb in the shape of a woman, gossamer, smoke and mist. Her clothing fell from her transparent form to fall into a tangle beside Amy.
And then she was gone. The wind died. The whisper stilled in the pines.
Amy stared openmouthed at where Katrina had disappeared. All that lay on the rock were Katrina’s clothes, the pen and the checkbook. Amy reached out towards the clothes. They were damp to the touch.
Or foam
Amy looked up into the lightning sky. But Katrina hadn’t just turned to foam, had she? Something had come and taken her away before that happened. If any of this had even been real at all. If she hadn’t just lost it completely.
She heard weeping and lowered her gaze to the surface of the lake. There were four women’s heads there, bobbing in the unruly water. Their hair was short, cropped close to their heads, untidily, as though cut with garden shears or a knife. Their eyes were red with tears. Each could have been Katrina’s twin.
Seeing her gaze upon them, they sank beneath the waves, one by one, and then Amy was alone again. She swallowed thickly, then picked up her checkbook to read what Katrina had written before what could only have been angels came to take her away:
“Is this what having a soul means, to know such bittersweet pain? But still, I cherish the time I had.
Those who live forever, who have no stake in the dance of death’s inevitable approach, can never understand the sanctity of life.”
It sounded stiff, like a quote, but then Amy realized she’d never heard how Katrina would speak, not the cadence of her voice, nor its timbre, nor her diction.
And now she never would.
The next day, Matt found Amy where her brother Pete said she was going. She was by the statue of the little mermaid on Wolf Island, just sitting on a bench and staring out at the lake. She looked haggard from a lack of sleep.
“What happened to you last night?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I decided to go for a drive.”
Matt nodded as though he understood, though he didn’t pretend to have a clue. The complexities that made up people’s personalities were forever a mystery to him.
He sat down beside her.
“Have you seen Katrina?” he asked. “I went by Lucia’s place looking for her, but she was acting all weird—” not unusual for Lucia, he added to himself “—and told me I should ask you.”
“She’s gone,” Amy said. “Maybe back into the lake, maybe into the sky. I’m not really sure.”
Matt just looked at her. “Come again?” he said finally.
So Amy told him about it all, of what she’d seen two nights ago by the old L & N sawmill, of what had happened last night.
“It’s like in that legend about the little mermaid,” she said as she finished up. She glanced at the statue beside them. “The real legend—not what you’d find in some kid’s picturebook.”
Matt shook his head. “‘The Little Mermaid’ isn’t a legend,” he said. “It’s just a story, made up by Hans Christian Andersen, like The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ They sure as hell aren’t real.”
“I’m just telling you what I saw.”
“Jesus, Amy. Will you listen to yourself?”
When she turned to face him, he saw real anguish in her features. “I can’t help it,” she said. “It really happened.”
Matt started to argue, but then he shook his head. He didn’t know what had gotten into Amy to go on like this. He expected this kind of thing from Geordie’s brother who made his living gussying up fantastical stories from nothing, but Amy?
“It looks like her, doesn’t it?” Amy said.
Matt followed her gaze to the statue. He remembered the last time he’d been on the island, the night when he’d walked out on Katrina, when everything had looked like her. He got up from the bench and stepped closer. The statue’s bronze features gleamed in the sunlight.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess it does.”
Then he walked away.
He was pissed off with Amy for going on the way she had and brooded about her stupid story all the way back to the city. He had a copy of the Andersen Fairy Tales at home. When he got back to his apartment, he took it
