The Drowning Kind

prologue

July 18, 2000

The dead have nothing to fear," Lexie said.

The two of us treaded water, lips blue, teeth chattering.

My sister wore her new light-blue bikini, the color of the sky, and I had on one of her hand-me-downs, the fabric so worn that it was sheer in places.

So when we play the Dead Game, we keep our eyes open, no matter what. Her face was as serious as serious got. Swear it? Swear you’ll keep them open?

I nodded.

Even if you see Rita? she asked.

Shut up, Lex.

She’s down there, you know. She’s waiting for us.

Shut up! I swam away from her, closer to the edge of the pool.

She laughed, shook her head. Don’t be such a chicken. Then she seemed to feel bad, to take pity on me maybe; to remember I was only nine. She put out her hand, pointer finger extended. Come on, she called. I swam back to her, reached out, crossed her finger with my own. The X girls, she said.

Now and forever, I finished. Then we hooked our fingers together, squeezed, and let go.

If she comes for one of us, she’ll have to take us both, Lexie said.

Lex!

On three, she said. One. Two. Keep your eyes open, Jax. I’ll know if you cheat.

I took the deepest breath I could.

Three!

We put our faces under and floated, suspended in the dark water like twins in the womb.

Our grandmother’s pool was twenty by forty-five feet and surrounded by carved granite. Moss grew in the cracks between the damp, gray stones; the sides were stained green with algae. Because it was spring fed, there was no pump, only an outlet at the far end that drained into a stone-lined canal that made its way across the yard and down to the brook below, which led, eventually, to the river. Weeds grew along the edges, clinging to the stone, floating with Lexie and me. When they got too thick, Gram would scoop them out; for a time, she kept a trout, saying the fish helped keep the water clean and free of insects. My sister loved the pool. I hated it; the water was black—so dark that you couldn’t see your feet when you treaded water. It stank of rot and sulphur, tasted like burnt matches and rust, and was colder than the ice bath my mother plunged me in once when my fever got too high. It sucked the breath out of you; numbed your limbs, left your skin red and your lips blue. Each time we came out of the water, we really did look like the dead girls we were pretending to be.

Lexie and I spent every summer at Sparrow Crest with Gram, in the tiny village of Brandenburg, Vermont. It was a three-hour drive (yet felt worlds away) from our dull ranch house in the suburbs of Massachusetts, part of a huge grid of equally dull houses with postage-stamp yards and a garage if you were lucky. Sparrow Crest was a dark, damp, sprawling place, made of stone and huge hand-hewn beams, covered in decades of ivy. There was a half-round window in the front like an eye. Behind the house were two immense hills, thick with trees. Mom and Ted would stay with us for a long weekend here and there, but mostly it was the three of us. Gram looked forward to our visits all year. She was lonely in her big old house all by herself. That’s what Mom said.

So our summer lives centered around visiting our grandmother—and the pool. Gram had a lot of rules about swimming: We couldn’t go in the pool unless she was home. We were never to go in alone. We had to take breaks and warm up after half an hour at most. And we were never, ever to swim at night. Too dangerous, she pronounced. As if she’d needed to warn us—the knowledge of what had happened to our aunt Rita, our mother’s baby sister, who drowned when she was only seven years old, should have been enough.

I let myself picture it as I held my breath beside my sister playing the Dead Game: a little girl floating, hair fanned around her, tangled with weeds. A girl who would never grow up. I knew Rita was the reason we could never let Gram see us playing the Dead Game. The one time she’d caught us floating facedown together, she’d ordered us out of the water, shaking, terrified. Lexie explained it was a breath-holding game, but Gram announced a new pool rule: We must never, ever do such a morbid thing again, or she’d ban us from the water altogether.

We knew we shouldn’t play it, but it was Lexie’s favorite, and she always won. We only played the game when we knew Gram was in the living room watching her afternoon programs and wouldn’t catch us. But still, the idea that she might, made it seem extra dangerous. Gram didn’t get mad often, but when she did it was like one of those summer thunderstorms that shook the house to its very foundation, that had you hiding under the covers, praying for it to pass.

Gram had grown up at Sparrow Crest. She’d been married here, under a big canopy set up in the backyard. She had her babies here, three healthy girls born in the upstairs bedroom with a local midwife attending. She swam in the pool every day, even did cold plunges in the winter, chopping the ice until she had a hole wide enough to slip into. She’d strip off her parka and ski pants to reveal her polka-dot bathing suit, then lower herself feetfirst until only her head popped out like a seal. She claimed it kept her young, that it rejuvenated her. Gram seemed strong and brave to me, but Lexie once told me she had a sickness called agoraphobia.

She doesn’t seem sick, I’d argued. The only part I understood was gore, which meant blood and guts and things in R-rated movies I wasn’t allowed to see.

It’s not a sickness you can see, dummy, Lexie shot back. Aunt Diane told me.

Lexie was right: Gram almost never left the house, had never learned to drive, had all her groceries delivered. She was tough enough to chop a hole in the ice and swim in January, so it was hard to think of her being trapped by her own mind.

Facedown, we floated. Lexie timed us with a fancy diving watch she’d gotten for her birthday: My record for staying under the water was one minute, twelve seconds. Lexie had gone up to two minutes. She was like a fish, my sister. Sometimes, I was sure she had secret gills no one could see. But I was a creature of land, and my heart did funny things when I was in the water and not moving to stay warm. I lost all sense of time.

I had no idea how long we’d been under now, and it took every ounce of willpower not to swim furiously to the edge and pull myself out of the pool. I kept my eyes open, scanning the darkness, searching for a glimpse of Rita: a flash of her white nightgown, a pale hand reaching up from the depths.

I knew from old photos that Rita was tiny, a girl with dark hair, bright blue eyes, that she was never a camera hog like her two older sisters. And I knew she had loved to read. Lexie and I found books she’d written her name in: Charlotte’s Web, Little House on the Prairie, the Ramona books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Our favorite board game in the house was Snakes and Ladders because it had Rita’s name in big block letters on the inside of the box, along with a drawing of a snake and a little girl in a dress—Rita’s imaginary friend Martha. Whenever we found something with her name on it, we’d talk about why Rita had gone to the pool in the middle of the night; whether it was Mom, Gram, or Aunt Diane who found her floating the next morning. And my sister loved to torment me with made-up stories about Rita. "She’s still here, you know. She lives in the pool. Haven’t you seen her down there? When you open your eyes underwater? She lives in the pool, but she comes out sometimes."

I pictured it, pale little Rita with her dark hair dripping wet, pulling herself up out of the pool, eyes on the house where other children were playing with her toys, reading her books.

Listen, Lexie would whisper late at night when she snuck into my room, crawled under the covers with me. Don’t you hear that? That squish, squish, squish of footsteps? She’s coming for you. Coming for us both.

My fingers and toes were numb. My lungs were crying out for air. My heart was banging inside my chest, but I held still, kept my eyes wide open.

We floated, my sister and I.

Two dead girls, side by side, bodies bumping against each other.

Alone, but together.

chapter one

June 14, 2019

How are things going at school, Declan?" I asked.

Declan was hunched over a drawing he’d been working on for the past twenty minutes, showing no sign of having heard me.

He was my last appointment of the day. The client before him had been a fourteen-year-old girl with PTSD—listening to her detail her abuse was always gut-wrenching. I usually made sure she was my last appointment, because after an hour of helping her navigate trauma and work on coping mechanisms, I was drained, sick-feeling and headachy. But it was an extra-busy week—too many kids and too little time—so I’d scheduled Declan at the end of the day. Things had been going so well with him lately that I’d actually been looking forward to our session.

I’d been seeing Declan for nearly eight months. For the first three, he had sat drawing, giving monosyllabic answers to all my questions. But then, in the fourth month, we’d made a breakthrough. He’d started talking. He’d drawn a picture of a bird’s nest and in it, three blue eggs. Resting in with them was a smaller, speckled brown egg.

Robin’s eggs? I asked, pointing at the blue ones. He nodded.

But what’s this brown one?

Cowbird egg, he said. Cowbirds don’t make nests of their own. The females lay eggs in other birds’ nests.

For real? I asked. What happens when they hatch?

"The mother robin or blue jay takes care of it, treats it like the others. But it’s not like the others."

This led to a discussion about what it might feel like to be the odd one out, to not belong. Declan loved animals and had an encyclopedic knowledge of animal facts, and I learned to use them as a springboard for our discussions—I even added nature books and field guides to the shelves in my office for us to look through together. Soon, he was opening up about his father’s abandonment, and how his mother continued to lie to him about it—to say he’d be back any day, or that he’d called to check in on Declan and had told her how much he missed his son. It’s all a bunch of stupid lies, Declan told me. She’s always telling these crazy stories that I know aren’t true. She thinks she’s protecting me, but really she’s just lying.

Declan had come to trust me, to share things that he wasn’t able to share with anyone else. But today, it seemed we were back to square one.

I tried to relax my shoulders, put aside my fierce headache and focus on figuring out what was going on right now with this little boy who sat at the small table in my office, studiously ignoring me. The drawing paper was crumpled in places, damp from his sweaty hand; he was grinding the blue crayon into angry, cyclonic swirls. I studied his face, his body language. His dark hair was tousled. His breathing was quick and shallow. The crayon broke in two. He picked up both halves, clenched them in his fist, and continued to scribble hard.

Did something happen at school? I asked. Or at home? Anything you want to tell me about? I felt like I had a spike going through my left eye. Even my teeth ached. I’d been getting migraines since I was twelve, and had learned there wasn’t much that helped them other than holing up in a dark, quiet place, which wasn’t an option right now.

Declan was nine years old. He’d been to three schools in the last year, but we’d finally found one that seemed to be a perfect fit—small, alternative, and with a nature-based curriculum that he loved. His mother and I had pushed hard to get him accepted, meeting with the principal and the behavioral specialist, convincing them to take a chance. Declan seemed to be thriving. He was doing well with academics and fitting in socially. Students spent half the day outside; there was a community nature center, gardens, and a pond. They’d been raising their own trout from eggs—Declan gave me weekly trout updates during our sessions. They were nearly big enough to release, and the whole school was going to have a big party on the last day and release the fish into the pond. Declan had been so excited: Little fish he’d watched hatch were ready to leave the tank.

How are the trout doing? I tried.

He scribbled harder, keeping his eyes on the paper. I had a dream about them. A bad dream.

Yeah? I leaned in. Can you tell me about it?

He frowned, stared down at the furious swirls. They weren’t who they said they were.

I took in a breath. Rubbed at my left eye, which had started to water. Who weren’t? The trout?

He nodded. "They were something else. They’d turned into something else."

What did they turn into?

He didn’t answer, just pursed his lips tighter.

Dreams can be scary, I said at last. But they’re only dreams, Declan. They can’t follow you into real life.

He looked up at me. Promise?

Promise, I said. The fish in your class, they’re still the same beautiful trout they always were, right?

He looked up and gave me a half smile. Right, he said. They are.

And you’re going to let them go in the pond next week, right?

He nodded, started putting all the crayons away. He took the drawing, crumpled it up, put it in the trash.

Are you feeling sad about letting them go? Worried, maybe?

He thought a minute. No. It’s time. They’re meant to be free, not live in a tank.

And you’ll still be able to see them, I said. They’ll be in the pond. You can go visit them anytime you want.

He nodded. Ms. Evans says we can even catch them in nets if we want, but I don’t think it’ll be that easy, do you? If I was one of those fish, I wouldn’t let anyone catch me ever again.

He spent the rest of the session talking excitedly about all the activities planned for the final week of school: the trout release, a picnic, a field trip to the science museum. When he left, his mom and I confirmed his appointment for next Friday.

Have a great last week of school, I told him.

As I was closing up my office for the night, I pulled the picture out of the trash. I opened up the paper and smoothed it out. He’d drawn what appeared to be a turbulent sea with big, dark fish. His nightmare trout? They had black eyes, open mouths with jagged teeth. Some had long tentacles. And there was a little stick figure in with them, sinking, being pulled down by the tentacles, drowning. Himself?

I looked closer. No. This was not a little boy with dark hair and eyes. This was a woman with long black hair, a white shirt, and gray pants.

It was me.

I unlocked the door to my studio apartment, shouldering my way in, my laptop bag bulging with my work computer and notes. I set it down on the floor and attended to the first order of business: pouring myself a very large glass of wine and taking three ibuprofen. I took my first fortifying sip, then went over to the bed, stripped off my social worker outfit, and put on sweats and a They Might Be Giants T-shirt. My ex-boyfriend, Phil, had bought the shirt for me. Phil enjoyed outings of all sorts—concerts, plays, basketball games. I was more of a stay-at-home-and-watch-Netflix kind of gal, but Phil insisted that going out on proper dates was something normal couples did, so I went along with it. Phil was long gone, but the T-shirt was still going strong.

As I settled in on the couch and put my head back, I thought of Declan’s words: They weren’t who they said they were. And his drawing. I made a mental note to call the school on Monday to check in with his teacher, Ms. Evans, and see if she’d noticed any changes in his demeanor.

My job could be stressful as shit, but it had its good days, too. And on the good days—the breakthrough days when a cowbird was not just a cowbird or when a girl came into my office grinning, saying she’d used the techniques we’d been working on to get through a panic attack at school—it was all worth it. Even though I’d been in private practice for a little less than a year, my schedule was always full, and I had a waiting list of clients. Sadly, there was no shortage of messed-up kids. I gravitated toward the tough cases—the kids everyone else had given up on. My undergrad was in psychology, and I worked in community mental health out of college for several years before deciding to go back to school for my master’s in social work. I did it while working full time, taking night classes, filling my weekends with reading and writing. My area of focus was always kids.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out why I’d gotten into this line of work. And it was something my own therapist, Barbara, was fond of pointing out: You’ve never gotten over the fact that you couldn’t fix your sister when she got sick. You couldn’t save her, so you’re trying to save all these other kids. I’d been seeing Barbara since my undergrad days and was pretty sure she knew me far better than I knew myself—not that hard, since I rarely pointed my carefully honed skills of observation and insight at myself, figuring it was far more productive to save it for my clients.

I opened my eyes, took a sip of wine, and noticed the digital answering machine was blinking. Nine new messages. My stomach knotted.

I knew exactly who it was without needing to push play: Lexie. And if she’d called this many times, she was, no doubt, off her meds again. When she was off her meds, she forgot that we didn’t talk anymore. That we were now properly estranged.

As if on cue, the phone rang again—call number ten. I reached for it—following some deeply ingrained instinct, the need to connect with my sister—then stopped myself.

Jax? Jax! she shouted into the machine. The measurements don’t lie. It’s science! The fucking scientific method. Construct a hypothesis. Test your hypothesis.

I could go months without hearing from her, then all at once, I’d get a burst of Lexie. It was like all of a sudden, she remembered: Hey, I’ve got a sister. Maybe I should give her a call and say something really fucking cryptic.

And the truth was, we’d barely spoken at all over the past year or so. Since Gram died—a heart attack while in Arizona, the one vacation she’d ever taken—and left most of her savings to Lexie, as well as her huge house, Sparrow Crest, the place we’d loved so much when we were kids and dreamed of one day living in together. Aunt Diane got a small chunk of the money, though she was doing fine financially and didn’t need it. Me, ass-deep in student loan debt, driving a fifteen-year-old car and living in a shoebox apartment on the other side of the country: I got my grandfather’s old coin collection and some first-edition books. None of it turned out to be worth a thing. It was petty, feeling furious and scorned for being left out of the will; my sister had always been everyone’s favorite. I knew it but couldn’t help it. I was pissed off and tired of pretending that I wasn’t. I stopped calling to check in on Lexie. I made excuses for not visiting the house that was now her house. I relied on our aunt Diane to keep me informed on Lexie’s life back in Brandenburg. Barbara encouraged me to set boundaries, to distance myself from my sister. She told me that distancing myself from my sister was the healthiest choice I’d made in years, one that both Lexie and I were sure to benefit from. Lexie needs to learn to take better care of herself, and you jumping in to help her all the time isn’t helping her. And you, Jackie, need to focus on your own life and well-being. You need to learn who you are outside your sister’s orbit.

It still didn’t feel right, not picking up the phone. Part of me longed to answer, to reconnect with my sister, to apologize for being such a shit over this past year; to tell her I’d made a terrible mistake.

Over fifty meters! Lex was shouting, fast and furious, as I sat sipping my wine.

Seven yesterday, over fifty today, Lex said, nearly breathless with frenzy. Oh, Jax, you’ve gotta call me. No, better yet, you’ve gotta get on a plane. You’ve gotta come see this. Please, Jax! You’re the only one who would understand this!

She clicked off. Less than a minute later, the phone rang again.

Lexie didn’t have my cell number. I told her, via Aunt Diane, that I’d given up my cell phone, that the bills were too high, and I was going to be one of those old-school landline people who used an answering machine.

Jax? Lexie said into the machine. I know you’re there. I can feel you listening.

I turned the volume all the way down. There was no way to mute it, but I could lower it to a dull murmur. Guilt gnawed away at my stomach as I walked away from my sister’s disembodied voice, poured myself the hottest bath I could coax from the old water heater in the basement, complete with a handful of calming salts. I shut the door, tuned the radio to jazz, and did my best to forget all about my sister. I watched the faucet drip into the tub, saw the rust stains years of leaks had left in the old porcelain. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and went under, trying to still my mind, the water filling my ears and nose, muffling the world around me.

Hours later, the bottle of wine was long gone; I’d had a dinner of cheese, crackers, and olives and passed out on the couch watching The Body Snatcher. My sister had stopped calling around eleven.

The dull ring of the phone woke me a little before one. I was still stretched out on the couch, but Boris Karloff was gone and there was an exercise infomercial on. My mouth tasted like wine, and my stomach churned unpleasantly. My head still ached.

Jax? Lexie cooed into the machine. Even though I’d turned it down as low as it would go, I still heard her. This is important. The biggest thing that has ever happened to me. Or to anyone. This changes everything.

I stumbled off the couch, reached for the phone. By the time I picked it up, my sister was gone.

The next morning, after half a pot of coffee and three Advil, I sucked it up and called my sister. She didn’t answer. I left a message, apologizing for not getting back to her sooner. I lied and said I’d been away overnight and had just gotten home. I had a cover story figured out—a conference in Seattle on mood disorders. I probably wouldn’t need it—Lexie didn’t ask questions about my life, especially not when she was manic; she was too caught up in her own drama.

Call me back when you get this, I said. I’d love to catch up.

I let myself imagine it: How easy it would be to fall into the familiar patter of conversation with her; how comforting to slip back in like there had never been a rift.

But it wouldn’t be like that, not really. Lexie was off her meds, and I’d be thrust into the role of coaxing her to get back on them, to go see her doctor, to seek help. I could already hear Barbara’s advice: Boundaries, Jackie. Remember your boundaries.

I went through my usual Saturday routine: the gym, grocery shopping, a trip to the dry cleaners. I called her again before lunch. Then in the afternoon. I imagined her at Sparrow Crest, looking at the ringing phone, too wrapped up in her own mania to answer. Or, maybe she was being petty. You don’t pick up for me, I don’t pick up for you.

Touché.

It’s me again, I said to voice mail. If you’re mad at me, I get it, but do me a favor and call me back anyway, okay? My words were clipped, annoyance coming through loud and clear. Around three, I was actually worried enough, or maybe I was just pissed off enough, to call Aunt Diane.

Lexie is off her meds again, I said instead of hello.

Is she? I haven’t heard a peep from her. Not a single message.

Odd. When my sister had a manic episode, she called everyone, starting with my father and Diane. I guess that makes me the lucky one, I said. She’s left me over a dozen, none making sense. And now she’s not answering her phone.

Do you want me to go check on her? I’m heading out that way this evening. There’s a poetry reading in Hanover.

Poetry reading?

I’m not getting all hoity-toity intellectual. Are you imagining me all beatnik with a black turtleneck and beret? I’m actually in hot pursuit of a woman—a poetry lover.

Really? I snorted into the phone. Our fifty-six-year-old aunt had divorced our uncle Ralph ten years ago, come out of the closet, and now seemed to be with a new woman each week, making up for lost time. Diane usually called me at least once a week to check in, but it had been over two weeks since I’d heard from her. I figured either she was super busy at work or caught up in one of her brief, feverish flings.

Nothing like wine, a bookstore, and a little poetry to open one up to the powers of love.

I’m not sure how much love has to do with it, I said.

‘What’s love got to do with it?’ she sang, doing her best Tina Turner. Then she stopped, chuckled. Are you calling it a secondhand emotion? Speaking of which— She paused, seemed to hesitate, then plunged ahead. Have you heard anything from Phil?

I blew out an exasperated breath. Phil and I have been officially over for nearly a year now.

I closed my eyes, saw his face when I’d told him it was finally over. His normally ruddy cheeks went pale, his lips turned blue like he’d forgotten to breathe. We were in the grocery store, of all places, and he had been pointing out for the millionth time how much easier it would be if we moved in together, so we wouldn’t need to buy things like separate toothpaste and bags of coffee and toilet bowl cleaner. We were in the toothpaste aisle when I told him that I couldn’t ever be the person he was asking me to be, the person who would share everything with him.

I know, Diane said. But you said he was still calling. I thought maybe…

Maybe what?

"You’d decide to give him a second chance, Jax. You’re far too young to be playing