She filled her chest with the misty air, pinched her nose, and jumped.
The lake water caught her as it had a thousand times before, but its embrace felt foreign at this early hour. Her limbs felt dense and stiff as she chopped through the water, trying not to sink too deep, where the water grew cold. From eye level the billowy vapor distorted her depth perception and she lost perspective of where she drifted, where the boat hid. Or the shore. She kept paddling forward. It had to be there. She tried to whistle a low tone to echo off the boat, but humid air absorbed the sound as it escaped her lips.
Finally, her outstretched hand swept the cold aluminum side of the boat.
“Hello?” she whispered, and rapped on the side. Fog muffled the hollow echo of her knuckles on the hull. She pushed the front of the boat and kicked with all her strength. The abandoned craft resisted, but as Cadie fought, the boat slowed, then grudgingly reversed direction. Her labored breath echoed off of the boat with a hush. As she entered the shallows in front of her secluded beach, she lodged the wayward craft in the sand and stood up.
Two oars lay next to a rope coiled on the bottom. Plenty of dings, but no holes. A perfect vessel. As if it had drifted to her, for her. Someone meant for her to find this boat. She would explore the whole lake on her own, discover a place no one knew existed.
Cadie surveyed her house, and, seeing no sign of her parents, she dragged the boat fifty yards around the shoreline and tied it to the drooping birch branches behind the rocks where she used to play pirates. She ducked as a ribbon of starlings curled above her head, their wings murmuring secrets she couldn’t understand. The arc of green-black wings swooped toward the water where she stood, wet and naked. She hugged her arms around her waist and hurried through the shallows to get her pajamas from the pier.
Cadie’s knees shook as she eased the screen door shut behind her. She snuck back over the creaky kitchen floor, the nighttime chill held firmly in the peg nails securing the warped planks. She pressed her back against the door. Water dripped off the ends of her red ringlets, forming puddles on the floor.
Cadie slipped into the shower to hide her morning swim. She wanted to keep the boat. But even if no one claimed it, her parents would never let her take it out alone. She would be too scared to disobey them. She imagined her boat with no captain and slammed the shower door.
The smell of coffee greeted her as she reentered the kitchen. Her mother blotted a tangle of bacon with a paper towel and offered the plate to Cadie. The salty, chewy bacon exploded in her mouth, filling her nostrils with the bold smell of hickory.
Through the window she spied a glint of gold peeking between the rocks where branches left a sliver of the bow exposed. It glowed, singing a come-hither song only she heard. She squeezed her knees together and prayed her parents wouldn’t notice the blaze of anxious yellow.
She would take her boat out. No one would ever know.
After breakfast, Cadie wandered around the cottage, bumping into chairs, rereading the titles of books she had read again and again. She fingered the roughly hewn frame around a photo of her parents working on a farm in Canada before Cadie was born. Now her parents painted landscapes and made pottery in the woods of New Hampshire. They canned vegetables and chopped wood. Cadie had never even been outside of New England.
She flopped down on a small rug in front of the fireplace, stroking the woven fibers of dark red and burnt orange set off by flecks of turquoise and fuchsia—colors that did not exist in New Hampshire. She closed her eyes and willed the carpet to soar through the clouds, to take her back to Persia where it came from. Anywhere but the woods that framed her entire life.
“You’re making me crazy,” her mother said. “Do you want to throw a pot?”
The slip of clay moving through her hands, the sensation of art flowing from the tips of her fingers teased Cadie with possibility every time she sat at her mother’s pottery wheel. But Cadie’s vessels usually flopped. Despite having two working artists as parents, Cadie had inherited no artistic skills.
“I don’t feel like it.”
“You could go pick some berries. Then we can make something.”
Cadie knew the berries would sit in the fridge and rot, but she grabbed a plastic container from under the counter and slipped on her mud-crusted sneakers.
“Come, Friar,” she called to her border collie, and they ducked into the woods. Soggy twigs bent under her weight instead of snapping against the spongy forest floor. Shafts of sunlight broke through the canopy of maple, oak, and pine.
The closest neighbors lived so far through the forest, Cadie imagined herself alone in the world. Mud sucked at her shoes as she approached the swollen creek. According to her father, their creek came from an underground source. The water, filtered through the minerals on its way to the surface, was the purest water anywhere, her dad had told her over and over. She scooped up a mouthful.
Instead of heading toward the blueberries, Cadie followed the creek deeper into the forest in search of the spring she half believed existed. The property along the creek belonged to the state, a wide swath of conservation land dividing her property from that of the neighbors she had never met.
Cloven moose prints and the delicate handprints of raccoons marred the soft mud. Some days she found evidence bears had stopped for a drink. Large trees never took root on the soft banks. The saplings that tried, tipped and fell as soon as they reached adolescence because the soil turned to soggy cake during the spring thaw and couldn’t support their roots. A wide, treeless corridor on either side of the creek let the light pour in.
The Granite State was famous for its thin, rocky topsoil. Farmers pulled stones out of the fields when they cleared the land, but new rocks surfaced every year. The rain came, the freeze, the thaw, shifting the soil so the smaller particles slipped below the stones and pushed rocks up, the way Brazil nuts always rise to the top of a bowl of mixed nuts. The soil shuddered and moaned, heaving new stones up each spring.
But not around Silas Creek, where Cadie could sink up to her ankles in the brownie-batter mud and never hit a rock. The silty mud dried like a dusting of cocoa powder on her ankles whenever she tromped through it.
Countless times, she had tracked the windy waterway deep into the woods where a rusty barbed-wire fence cut through the forest, spanning the creek before she could get to the underground source. The fence created a barrier between her property and protected marshlands on the interior of the peninsula where she lived. She had tried to shimmy under the wire, but dead vines clinging to the fence gave her the creeps. A single rusty scratch could give her lockjaw, according to her mother. She always chickened out.
As she turned a bend in the creek, Cadie halted. A birch tree, reckless enough to take root on the bank, had lost its footing and fallen, buckling part of the fence to expose an opening barely big enough for Cadie to slither under.
She splashed through the icy water and dropped to all fours. First one shoulder, then the other under the treacherous wires. Stones shifted under the slick soles of her sneakers. Friar huffed his disapproval.
The forest on the other side looked similar to hers, but the forbidden woods seemed thicker, denser. She cocked her head to see if the sky looked different from the other side. A stone shifted and she fell to her elbows, her chin hitting the water. Sharp rocks dug into her knees, distracting her so she didn’t feel the stabbing in her shoulder at first. An inch-long gash on her upper arm beaded with blood droplets where a rusty barb had torn through her flesh. She crawled backward out from under the fence.