Something smooth glanced against her cheek. Again, again, like a playful push. Dee opened her eyes. Dark grey and black scales filled her vision, flowing. She held her breath. The snake’s body was sunk a little beneath the surface but it held its head up, somewhat above the water, like a swan. The snake circled her slowly and curiously. It brushed her arm once as it swam. It was probably attracted to her body heat. What kind was it? Dee forced her juddering brain to think. It looked like a cottonmouth but surely you didn’t get them around here. Another idea kept trying to slide into her mind and she had to work very hard to keep it out. Rattlesnake. It was then she realised there were two more heads periscoping out of the water to her left, then three or four. They were a group, a family perhaps. Several juveniles, young mature snakes and a large adult with its ancient head, its broad lipless smile. Exactly how many there were she could not say – her heart had stopped. A blunt head swooped gracefully towards her face. Dee closed her eyes and thought, This is it, the end. She waited for the needle fangs, the poison, for the carrion mouth to close on her. She thought she felt the feather kiss of a tongue on her jaw. Her life was thunder in her ears. She tried to hold herself still against the swell of the water, to be nothing alive, to be stone. Something brushed against her shoulder in a long caress.
Dee didn’t know how long she stood there, time had expanded and collapsed. When at last she opened her eyes the water was smooth and empty. Maybe they were gone. But maybe they were writhing about her arms and legs out of sight, under the water. She seemed to feel their touch all over her body. She began to shiver uncontrollably, head baking in the bright day. Her legs buckled and she sank and gasped, mouth filling with tin. She turned and waded for the shore, water grabbing her, slowing her to a deathly pace. She could still feel them garlanding her limbs.
Dee reached the shore. She ploughed out of the water and the weight of her body descended on her again. She staggered and fell. The sand was good underneath, against her side. She made herself into a ball and cried, unobserved, among the running sunburned kids.
Dee slowly picked her way back through blankets and umbrellas. The air was hot with sugar and the sand sucked at her ankles. She didn’t have her watch on but she knew she’d been gone longer than half an hour. All she wanted now was the sanctuary of her family. Her mother would shudder, cry out and take Dee in her arms. Lulu would look scared and excited at the same time and ask over and over, How many snakes? What kind? And her father would be furious, ask what the hell the lifeguard had been doing, and Dee would bask in the warmth of his anger, knowing she was cared for. It would become a story, one they all told in hushed voices sometimes. Do you remember when Dee Dee got attacked by the snakes? The story would live outside her then, and no longer run cold in her bones.
Even from a distance, Dee could see that that her parents were freaking out. Mom was screaming and Dad was shouting. Two lifeguards were there, and other men talking into radios. Dee cringed. How embarrassing. She was only a little late, for God’s sake.
As she came closer, she heard her father saying, ‘I just fell asleep for a minute. A minute.’
Dee came up to the blanket and sat down in the shade. ‘Mom?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry …’
‘Quiet, Dee, please. Your father is trying to make these people do something.’ Her mother’s mouth trembled. Mascara ran down her face like black blood. ‘Lulu!’ She stood suddenly and screamed it out. Heads nearby turned. ‘Lulu!’ her mother screamed again.
‘She has short hair,’ Dad is saying over and over. ‘People often think she’s a boy. She won’t grow it.’
Dee realised two things: first, they hadn’t noticed how long she had been gone; and second, Lulu wasn’t there. She sighed and tucked her hair behind her ear. The cramps were really bad now. She felt a stir of feeling. Lulu was being dramatic again. Now no one would comfort Dee and take the story of the snakes away.
As the long, hot afternoon wore on, more people came, and the real police. ‘Laura Walters, Lulu for short,’ everyone kept saying into radios, and then they started saying it to everyone on the shore, through the big speaker on the pole by the hotdog stand. ‘Laura Walters, six years old, brown hair, hazel eyes. Wearing a bathing suit, denim shorts and a red tank top.’ It was only in the dusk, as the park emptied, that Dee began to understand that they weren’t going to find Lulu that day. It took her much longer to understand that they would never find her. She had gone who knew where, with who knew whom, and she didn’t come back.
Some weeks later, many miles away, a family from Connecticut found a white flip-flop mixed up in their beach stuff. No one could say how it got there, or even if it was Lulu’s. It had been through the laundry with their clothes.
Lulu would be seventeen, now. Is, Dee corrects herself. Lulu is seventeen.
The last thing Lulu said to Dee was, I found a pretty pebble. Some days all Dee can think about is that pebble. What did it look like? Was it smooth or rough, grey or black? Was it sharp and angular or did it fill Lulu’s small palm with its
