CHAPTER TWO
Slackwater
Three years on, the mark was just a line under her clothes that Maren had stopped noticing.
It had not stirred since the night Vesper made it.
Whatever she'd felt on the stairs that first time, the warmth, the sense of being seen from the inside, had faded inside a week into ordinary ink, and after that it was only the thing she covered with a high collar in summer and forgot the rest of the year.
The cult, the warnings, the basin of black water: all of it had quieted down the same as any frightening night that comes to nothing.
A story they told each other sometimes, late, half laughing.
Now they were twenty-two, and the studio was dying. It still smelled the way it always had, of green soap and machine oil and the antiseptic bite of the work, the river-damp coming up through the boards under all of it, and some days the smell of it was the hardest thing in the room to stand.
Maren ran the needle along the last line of a magnolia on a tourist's calf and tried not to think about the rent.
She bent close over the work, small and wiry and economical with herself, the early ink that sleeved her own forearms catching the lamp, and when the black hair she cut herself fell across her eyes she shoved it back with the inked side of her wrist. The shop was hers and Lark's both, in theory, though it was Maren who kept the books and Maren who lay awake over them.
Bywater rent had doubled while they weren't looking; the whole of New Orleans was getting bought up around them.
Two chairs, one of them empty most days now.
The bell over the door had got into the habit of not ringing.
It was the deep of August, and the shop held the day's heat long after dark; the box fan by the door did little but move it from one chair to the other.
They had been all right, though, the two of them, through the lean of it.
Better than all right. Three years that weren't a marriage on paper and felt like the heavier kind anyway: the joint account that never held anything, the rows about nothing, whole evenings spent in the same small room not speaking and both content.
Somewhere in there Maren had stopped bracing for the day Lark walked out.
She would think about that later and want to take her younger self hard by the shoulders.
Two weeks before, they'd shut the shop early and walked down to the river with a six-pack going warm, and Lark had put her head in Maren's lap and invented whole lives for the strangers on the far bank until Maren was laughing too hard to drink.
It was an ordinary night. There'd been no reason to hold onto it, so she hadn't, and now it was one of the few she had.
Because something had been wrong for a month, and Maren had let it be wrong without asking.
It was small things. A name she half heard Lark say into the phone and didn't catch, a name that meant nothing and that Lark changed the subject away from.
Afternoons at the library, which Lark had hated her whole life and now took herself off to without a word.
Once Maren had found a notebook in the denim jacket while she was fixing the lining, a cheap drugstore one, half filled with Lark's slanting hand: names she didn't know, dates running back the better part of two hundred years, and in the margin a little inked drawing, a ring of water with something sinking down into the middle of it, that Maren had looked at far too long without working out why the sight of it sat so badly in her.
It was a good drawing. Lark had a good hand.
Maren had stared at it, and put the notebook back where she'd found it, and that was the nearest she ever came, while Lark was alive, to asking.
By then there was a whole list of things she had decided not to say.
Lark came in near closing, and Maren knew before she looked up that she was going out again.
She'd been like this all month. Bright in a brittle way, full of somewhere-to-be. She kissed the top of Maren's head and moved around the shop touching things, the way she did when she had something to say and had decided against it.
"Don't wait up," Lark said.
"Where."
"Just out. I'll be back." She was already pulling on the old denim jacket, the swallow Maren had inked between her shoulder blades years ago showing for a second at the collar. "It's nothing. I promise it's nothing."
Maren could have asked. She felt the question sitting there and she let it sit, because asking was a way of holding on too tight, and she had spent her whole life learning not to do that.
So she said, "Lock the back if you go past the lot," and Lark grinned at her, quick and a little sad, and said she would, and went.
That was the last of her. Maren would go over it for the rest of her life: the swallow at the collar, the grin, the door swinging to. She did not know to look. Nobody ever does.
?
She closed up alone a little after eleven.
The heat hadn't broken with the dark. It never did in August. She went through the shop turning off the lamps and capping the inks and wiping down the second chair, the empty one, out of a habit she couldn't make herself drop. She was bent over it with the cloth in her hand when it happened.
The mark moved.
It came as a warmth where there had been nothing for three years, and then a pull, low on her ribs, as though a thread sewn clean through her had been tugged hard from the far end.
She put her hand flat over it through her shirt.
The skin was hot under her palm. She could feel the whole design, Lark and the larks and the water, and it was not lying still the way ink lies still.
It was turning. A slow turn under the surface, like the start of a cramp, except a cramp does not feel like something waking up that doesn't yet know where it is.
She stood in the empty shop with her hand pressed to her side and didn't breathe.
The tube over the mirror buzzed. A car went past outside with its bass up and faded down the block.
The heat went on leaning at the windows.
And under her hand the mark slowed, and settled, into a new stillness that was worse than the moving had been, because it had the quality of listening.
She told herself it was nothing. A cramp.
A tired body and an old story she'd let get too far under her skin.
Cover it, the old woman had said, three years gone and half forgotten.
Keep it away from the water. Maren had not thought about Vesper in a year.
She thought about her now, turning the key in the lock, and made herself stop.
She walked home through the wet dark with her hand not quite leaving her side. The bayou ran flat and black beside the road the whole way, and she did not look at it.
?
The knock came a little after four.
Two officers stood on the step with their faces already set, and Maren knew, before either of them got a word out, the way you know. She would not keep much of what they said. Only pieces of it would come back to her, for years, at the worst possible moments.
They had found a woman in the water out past the Rigolets, in one of the still backwaters where the bayou goes to sleep and the algae comes in red off the Gulf in the heat and sits on the surface like rust. A jogger had seen her at first light.
There was no sign of anyone else having been down there.
The water in that spot was shallow and warm, and slow as oil.
People drowned in it every few years, the younger officer said, gently, as if that were a thing that might help.
Tourists, mostly. Drunk, or just unlucky.
They were very sorry. They needed someone to come and say it was her.
Maren heard herself say yes, and get dressed, and find her keys. Somewhere in her the news was happening to a different woman, one who looked like her and moved her hands and answered the questions, while Maren herself stood off to one side and watched and could not feel her own face.
?
One of them had used the word accident in the doorway. Softly, the way you'd set down something that might break. Maren had nodded. And under the nod, in a place with no words in it yet, something had gone cold and quiet and certain.
Because Lark was afraid of deep water.
Lark, who was afraid of nothing. Lark, who went first into every room and every dare and every year of the two of them, would not put a foot off the end of a jetty.
It was the one thing in the world that could make her small, and she had hated it: the dark pull under a swimming hole, her own body refusing to wade in past the knee.
She would not have walked out into a black backwater at the Rigolets in the middle of the night.
Not for anyone. Not unless someone she trusted had gone in ahead of her first.
There was nothing in that Maren could give the police. She knew how it would sound before she'd finished thinking it. My girlfriend was frightened of water. My tattoo moved. She kept it behind her teeth.
She stood in the middle of the apartment with her keys already in her hand and did not go anywhere.
The place was full of Lark. Her mug in the sink.
Her boots by the door, fallen against each other the way she'd stepped out of them an hour before she died.
The swallow Maren would never lay eyes on again.
And there in the gray before dawn, with the keys biting into her palm, the mark moved a second time.
It was not a cramp now and she could not tell herself it was.
The warmth came first, spreading up out of her ribs toward her heart, and then a pressure, slow and deliberate, the exact weight of a hand laid flat against the inside of her own skin.
She felt the design shift under her shirt.
She felt the figure of Lark, larks and water and all of it, turn over against her heart and settle, as if it had come home, as if it had spent the whole night trying to reach that one spot and had only just arrived.
Maren clamped both hands over her mouth and did not scream.
In the dark, under her palms, she could feel her own pulse going hard and fast. And beneath it, slower, keeping its own time and not hers, she could feel something else.