He put his hand out as if to offer it to the expanse and concede defeat to the vastness of the water before him. The Lake he loved so much had taken his child without warning or reason.

“A better place?” What better place could there be for a little girl than here, rolling in these waves and morning sunshine. He had remarked how harmless it was for her to be here with no jellyfish, no sharks and no rip tides to worry about.

The absence of these things would bring him back here time and time again with her and then finally in ruins without her. He was not aware that complacency was the prevailing predator here.

Bent over now with his hands on his upper thighs he heaved slightly to think of the fear she felt while he was distracted, looking away, trusting the odds. Rip tide or no rip tide she was gone.

He felt a few spitting rain drops on his upper back and watched the blackness grow on the other side as it rolled his way across the lake. He sent his anger out at the water only to decide that it had had no real part in the thing.

He crossed off a short list of people and circumstances to blame and wound up down to only himself.

He could imagine tomorrow and carrying on. Food. The morning buzz of coffee, The warmth of satisfying his social media addiction and closing his heart and thoughts in order to survive it. That was imaginable but hardly doable. Life would forever be swallowed with at best sand and at worst guilt. Always crushing guilt. Nothing would exist without the thing. He was thirty nine and had many mornings to wake up to realize that it’s not a horrible dream.

He led his kayak knee deep along the shore in procrastination while the punishing waves smashed into him. He rolled his paddle around in his hand and gripped it tightly. The rising wind was a gift, its timing undeniable. He began to feel warm in spite of the cold rain. He felt joy now as he paddled out past the break and out of sight to hold her

His dad had done most of the eleven hour drive and now it was 3am as they moved through the musty smell that these rooms take on after ten months with nobody in them. The family had a rhythm like a tide, ten months there, two months here. This moment was always exciting for all of them with summer stretched out ahead.

He felt the anticipation of catching those massive smallmouth Lake Erie bass and sleeping in the dorm on the cool old bunk beds with his brothers, of bonfires, friends and extended family but at fifteen these things were not the main attraction anymore.

Daylight was only three hours off. How could he sleep knowing she was probably there right now, actually there, just a three minute sprint through the deep sand at her grandfather’s cottage on the beach. How could he have missed her almost all of last summer until they met just a few days before he had to go back to school at the other end of the world which is what it might as well have been. She must have been on Erie Road. She must have been on the beach.

One single scoop of tiger tail. That’s what she ordered. “We don’t have tiger tail in the states,” she told him. He gave her an impossibly large scoop in hopes that she would come back. She never left the ice cream stand that day. She leaned on the sticky counter and they talked until they closed.

“You should wipe this sticky counter,” she told him. “You should shut up”. He meant it as a joke of course and she seemed to get it but even though it broke the ice it echoed through his head and he wondered if it was too edgy. They were together every possible minute last summer until he left and in the era before constant connection they had done the entire ten months without a word between them.

He stopped, winded on the sand in front of her grandfather’s cottage. It was just past 6am.”What the heck. Even if she’s here she’s probably not awake yet”. When he came back later he climbed the stairs but clearly the family had not arrived for summer yet. The winter covers were still on the windows and there were dead leaves in piles up against the cottage on the deck.

Later as he fished from the pier he watched the place for any movement. Day after day he repeated this. The walk by in the morning, the surveillance from the pier in the afternoon and a last walk by at night to check for the possible glow of human occupancy. The spring had been the hardest, wondering about her but this was torture. The rack.

Then one morning there was movement. Not there but at the place next door. He called up from the beach in a slightly higher pitch than usual thinking that might make him sound less threatening. “Hi… Hi… Excuse me!” A woman in her seventies leaned on her deck railing to talk to him. He didn’t ask about his friend specifically. That might freak her out so he asked about the family in general. She was direct and matter of fact. “I have no idea. They’re usually here by now”. ” Would you have a phone number for them?” She did not. Or maybe she just didn’t want to give it out to a stranger.

Every scoop of tiger tale he served made him wonder about her. Summer was half gone now. Every minute of it wasted. His eyes swept across the tourists until there were only a few days left. Leaving in August was always hard but this would be unbearable. The mystery alone would kill him.

Then one morning as he ran down the beach there she was. He called her name and she turned with a blank stare. He wondered if she would actually be able to see his heart pound. There was no smile and just a hint of confusion. He ran up to her so fast he almost ran her over. He was like a St. Bernard filled with love, excitement and devotion.

As she began to recall him she looked down and stirred the sand with her foot. A small smile… “How’s it going?”. He was crushed. They sat on the rocks and she told him she had been in a hospital. He looked down at the thin red cut marks on her thighs. He had wanted to kiss her and touch her but now he wanted to hold her and help her. He had ten months to build her up as some golden goddess of love when all she was was a child trying to survive her teens, He would be her friend and he realized that that’s all he ever was. Later he walked out on the pier, cast his line and thought of other things.

You. I know you. I remember you. You’ve changed a little like teenagers do. A little skinnier, a little taller, a little poofier hair. You hooked me twice last year. Do you have any idea how much it hurts to have a hook through your face and be hoisted up outta your world into some outer space where you can’t even breath?

That’s not the worst of it. The worst wasn’t the first time. It was knowing that I fell for it AGAIN! What worm has pink sparkles in it? I still had that bitter rubber taste in my mouth when I fell for it AGAIN!. If I had a finger I would be shaking it at you right now. You. You will not fool me again. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, I’m a fuckin’ idiot. Fool me three times, not gonna happen Sunshine. This is nice clear water. I see you and you see me and you’re lookin’ at me and you think you know what I’m thinking. You think I’m new. You don’t recognize me because to you we all look the same. I’M NOT LAWRENCE FISHBURN! I”M SAMUEL L. JACKSON!. We don’t all look the same.

I can even hear you holding court with your little buddies up there talking about this kind of bait and that kind of lure and what time of day we’re hungry and when we’re not and what we’re thinking. Calm down there Spencer Tracey it ain’t that simple. I think you’re underestimating your opponent here. You make me laugh.

Oh that’s cute. oh… ok you’re hangin’ it right in front of me like I’m some kinda shmo. Oh you’re gonna follow me around with it now? Oh hold me back. i just gotta have another bite of that tasty sparkly rubber like I ain’t had enough already.

I hear you talking about your cousin up there in the Kawarthas and the horrible heinous things he does to my people. “Clean?” He “cleans” them!? Is that what he does? Can you say decapitate? Say it. Say disembowelment. Say dismemberment. I wanna hear you say what it is. It’s MURDER! That’s what it is. At least you throw me back. But not before the selfies and the high fiving and the excitement like I’m here for your fuckin’ amusement?

I’m gonna stay right here and warn any and all of my friends and family about you and your sparkly worm. Watch out for Mr. Sparkly worm. Well I’m at least a four pounder now. It’s my job to protect the tribe and I’ll be here every day so get comfy. it’s gonna be a very long summer for you sir.

Ok what’s this? Oh ok. nice worm. No sparkles. Wait, is this a… You sprung for live worms? At five bucks a box you bought real worms? You must be makin’ bank there scooping ice cream you can afford real worms? Ya I know about you and your job at the ice cream stand. I can hear you talking about yourself all the time.

That actually looks pretty good. I think I’ll just take a little off the bottom. Nowhere near the hook just below it just to cost you a worm. And another and another. You can keep throwing new worms out and I’ll be glad to fill up on tasty half warms and run you right outta business. I will send you packing and you are welcome. You sir have met your match.

All right. Thank you father for this juicy tasty ass lower half of an actual earthworm we are about to receive. Here we go. Over the lips, under the gums, look out stomach here …

She took down a picture from the hallway and tucked it under her arm. It’s the only thing she would take. It was of her grandfather as a toddler in front of a canvas tent. He was camping out on the dune in this very spot before HIS father built the cottage in the nineteen twenties. It was a two story, open stud, twentieth century, three season summer stunner as the real estate listing had aptly described it. “Tear it down and build your dream home, or pimp it out”.

You couldn’t stay in winter. The incoming cold would push you out around November first. Warren would assure you he’d blown the water out of the pipes a few times to make sure they wouldn’t freeze and burst.

The place was a shrine. Even the furniture seemed sacred. There was a lot of plush pumpkin orange and olive green. A tribute to her parents’ time here. Stuff that’s “probably worth a lot of money now” as her Dad had said so many times. A lot of money or nothing at all just like the cottage itself.

There was a chrome trimmed arborite kitchen table where her aunts would play poker in their bras and underwear to combat the heat trapped within the two by fours and clapboard. They would sweat and yell at each other in yiddish with love and trust and frustration. She was fifty two and they were all gone now but they sat there at that table in her mind. She could keep that table if by some miracle.

Even though she was the only one left to inherit the place there was never a trust set up to protect her from having to pay the capital gains tax which by now would be an enormous amount of money considering what it was worth. It was October and she was there to say goodbye.

October. What an appropriate time to end a season that lasted a hundred years. She would have one last walk through before leaving here forever. She had spent all her childhood summers here with her smokey sweaty aunts and her sweet sweet grandparents. She hadn’t been back here in so long having drowned herself in her carrier like alcohol.

It was hard to come back but now she wanted to keep it for another hundred years even though there were times when she would rather watch a wrecking ball smash through that little single attic window. She knew she wasn’t the only fourteen year old girl in an attic window with an uncle who had no regard for anything or anyone but his own sick perversions. She had stayed quiet through it and stared out that tiny payne at lake Erie and imagined floating on her back out there in the middle of it.

But this time she wasn’t here to think about that. She had chained him to a cinder block and shoved him overboard long ago if only in her fantasies. He was the wrecking ball at the end of a chain. A destroyer of innocence. There would be no wrecking ball today.

“Oh God. They wouldn’t”. She wept to think that whoever bought the place wouldn’t see it. Wouldn’t feel it. They might not see or hear her funny aunts or the charm of open studded walls, hunter green trim and a singing fish that would sing Ol Man River when you pressed a little red button. These things aren’t on House Hunters.

Just like so many things in her past she had no control over the future. She walked out onto the beach, turned around and looked up at the place. She was no longer in that attic window and he was where he belonged. At the bottom of the lake.She pulled on the strings to tighten her hood and walked away.