Gwendolyn and the Crows

Skin of pale ivory and bony fingers made to hold her own heart, the girl looks a lost ghost. She haunts my house and fills the room with sobs and silence. On Sunday, her tears filled the room with salt water. The furniture began to float, and we were forced to tread water, our noses kissing the ceiling. God did not favour her. She was the unluckiest girl I ever knew. Her mother, lovely and smelling of cinnamon and sugar, spoke with a sharp tongue. It was August when they found her at the bottom of Lake Marion. She was resting among the reeds with the creatures and the fish. The willow by the lake wept. The girl’s father was a good man with introverted habits and west coast ways. He was more notable as a husband than a father, however, and now that his fair lady’s soul was amongst the constellations, he failed to see the world in colour. His misery bled into the monotonality of his life, staining his daughter in cruel shades of grief. The little nymph would bring him cups of tea, tug at his sleeve, sit curled on his lap like a cat, arms strung around his neck. He was choking.

Like a baby left on a doorstep, the man drove his daughter down the flooded streets of Castor Parade. The rain had set in, the mechanical rhythm of the windshield wipers a pendulum, placing the man in a trance of the strangest hypnosis. It was in this trace that the white knuckles of his left hand pounded on our door. His brother, my father, had answered. I remember the unexpectancy of it all; he hadn’t even called. I watched the childlike hands of the girl play with the hem of the tablecloth as the brothers spoke, deep and solemn and grave. At the door, the father hugged his daughter for the last time. He would only be gone for a week, he told her. Work, he said, and, in the meantime, she would stay with her family. I seemed to be the only one to see his lie. The car reversed out of our driveway, steadfast, narrowly missing our letterbox. Little did the little nymph know, it was never to be seen again.

Gwendolyn was to sleep with me. I would brush her hair before bed, with her sitting in front of me. She was as still as a doll. My doll began to cry silent tears and I realised that I was doing what her mother must have done, and what her father had failed to. She kissed my cheek before she hid under the blankets. I almost wept for her myself. I felt her little body toss, turn, and twist as she slept. I had always been a light sleeper, so I noticed every one of her movements from behind my closed eyelids. At the witching hour, she woke, breathless and screaming, calling for her father. It was nightmarish, and the morning light revealed the violet circles that deepened under her eyes as the days passed unforgivingly. The eighth day of her stay, the gravity of her father’s absence weighed her down, my own father too. He had his suspicions, but his brother never called once, and no one knew where he was. Not even his office knew. The great lie. Mr. Cramson had disappeared without a trace. The realisation of this was the lead in the girl’s shoes that kept her in place at the window, staring at something I couldn’t see. Shallow breaths and my little, sad, tortured doll.

The girl was often too sad to speak. What would she speak of? I imagined. Not the memories of her mother; of homemade goods and warmth and lullabies. Not of her father; the great magician, the cruel con, the disappearing act. Not of her old life or abandoned school friends or her long list of wishes and prayers. Yet it was I who spent the most time with her, often unbothered by her father’s passed on introverted nature. I was now the sister. Our blood was the same, I told her. Our veins connect us like the roots of a tree. This seemed to make her happy. For once, since the day of the doorstep departure, she knew she wasn’t alone. Maybe that is why she told me where her father was.

The nightmares that stole away my little doll were more terrible than I could have ever guessed. Every night it started the same, with her seeing her father drive from the house that rainy September day. He misses my mother badly, she told me. He hurts all over. She sees him drive to Lake Marion, an hour away, to the family’s old picnic spot. Summers of dragonflies, apricots, woven baskets, and the shimmering diamond lake. He misses her so badly, hurts so badly, that he wishes to see her one more time. To hold her again, the same way he had for years. It was all he wanted. So, he takes the small wooden paddle boat out to the middle of the lake, the same wooden boat that stayed permanent and overturned by the muddy shore year-round. The sky’s tears saturate his suit, causing the material to cling to his skin. There are crows circling, screaming overhead. And he falls. Backwards, deeper and deeper to the bottom of the lake where he swims with the blind eels and feels with his hands, grabbing at the water, Hades’ cold breath. His stomach scrapes the muddy bottom. Cheeks full of air. Until he feels her. His body collides with hers, desperate, and he stays there, wanting to be with his love, forever. Gwendolyn screams at him to leave her, to save himself. Come back to me. That’s when she knows he won’t, not even for her, and she wakes to the coldness of her reality.

I hold my little doll so tightly, whispering into her ears. It’s okay, I say. He is not there, I say. But I know, somehow, that it is not the truth. I know from the sinking of my heart, the weight in my stomach, the intuition a woman is born with. I do not show it, but I am scared for her.

Thunder sounded from the throat of the universe. The storm that brewed as strong as tea threatened to stay for eternity. We were paralysed with its presence, the corners of our mouths pointed absent-mindedly to the hardwood floor. My father lit the fire that attempted to warn us through spits and crackles. I wish I had listened. The universe had begun crying for tragedy that awaited me.

I woke heavy limbed and well rested. The angel of sleep had held me close last night, as I had stayed still, dreamless, peaceful. The angel had fled, however, at first light. It left to chase a butterfly. Butterflies have a way of hiding during storms.

My blood runs cold. Panic replaces the peace I was too undesirable to be gifted for long. I did not wake at witching hour. I did not hear her screams. I did not hear them, for she was not next to me when they escaped her mouth. My scared, stupid, little doll. I did not want to believe it, but I knew. I knew where she’d wandered. I knew where she’d be. She has missed her mother, but I knew she missed her father more. And it was closure she wanted, to see him one last time, the same way he wanted to see her mother one last time. I stole my father’s car and drove into the ugliness.

I thought of her shaking body, her bare feet. My little doll must have walked all night. It made me shiver to think of the darkness tangling around her. Swallowing her. My cold, determined, rain-covered doll.

The boat was missing from the shore. I got out of her car and saw it, placed picturesquely in the centre of the lake. I called her name. My voice was drowned out by the storm. I was the most scared I’d ever been in my life. I had to save her. So, I dove. The water stung my skin, I had never experienced something so cold. Breathless, I swam, fully clothed, to the centre of the lake. Above me, the crows circled and screamed.

I held my breath and dove in a straight line down, kicking against the reeds that grabbed at my ankles. When I felt lightheaded, I pushed myself to the surface, the heavy rainfall creating the illusion that I was still trapped underwater, in the depths, to be forgotten, facing towards the planet’s core. I struggled to breath. I struggled to think. But again, and again, I swam down to where the darkness tempted to take me also, and again and again I kicked to the surface, filling my fighting lungs, blinking away the tears that disguised themselves as the rain. One more time, I think, I will go one more time. My hands feel at nothing, the lake, I think, is empty. The only thing that led me here was myself. This was my own nightmare. It is not real. But it was not the truth. My feet find the bottom of the lake to press against, to propel myself back to the surface. But my feet didn’t meet the muddy bottom, or a rock, or an eel, or the thick reeds. It met, unmistakably, with a person. I broke the shattered mirror of the lake for the final time. The crows above me continued to circle, a symbol of the gloved hand, the dark fate. I screamed.