The Visit
The fog made her anxious and she navigated poorly, which led to bickering. After the village came the missed turn. Then they crossed at the wrong bridge. It was late by the time her husband angled the car down the gravel drive that snaked through the woods, leading to the vast, rugged clearing. Their young son pressed his nose to the glass at the sight of outbuildings, great ghosts hulking in the mist.
She stepped from the car onto sodden soil that yielded underfoot. Her glasses fogged. Before she felt ready, composed, their old friends tumbled out from the stone house, and she forced a smile, leaning in for hugs, presenting their son to these new adults, who in turn introduced their daughter, younger than the boy, but somehow stern, a grim fairy amidst these round-shouldered trees.
The sun hadn’t quite set, so the husband called for a tour. They trudged around the sagging barn, the floor rotting, the wood of the doors soft. The girl prodded a pulpy mass with a stick, exposing a teeming ball of grubs.
The land bled with wetness. Mist dripped down stalks of grass into the veined ground, capillaries of moisture weeping into dribbles, the dribbles pulsing into trickles, the trickles into rivulets, all seeping into a pool of blackly deep water thirty feet across, in the middle of which congregated a huddle of mallards.
The boy discovered frogs, slim speckled ones that jumped just as he closed his unpracticed hands around the slippery rubber of their bodies. He chased them to the edge of their refuge, and after the water swallowed the last of them, he turned his attention to the ducks, which batted their wings against the surface when his stones plopped near by. His mother warned him about mud, about his shoes, about the slickness of the grass.
Inside it was drier and she breathed more easily. The children feigned patience while drinks and crackers traveled on a tray. During a lull, the adults nodded and eyed one another, as though trying to recall why the four of them used to get along so well, and gradually, with the help of the Chablis, remembering. As the conversation crackled anew, the girl edged toward the door, disappearing, and the boy, uninvited, followed in her wake, avoiding his mother’s eye.
The parents pecked out questions about jobs and schools. They brushed against politics, stopped, backed away. More wine was poured, and finally they warmed up, returning to adventures from the past, before the children—especially the summer they’d vacationed together in the mountains so many years ago, renting that A-frame cabin, both couples playing at a simple life that one of them would end up taking seriously. Oh, and then the fish story—not of catching, but of cooking, and like old times the husbands grinned their way through the ritual humiliation of its telling.
As dinner approached, the children were to be fetched, which provided the opportunity to lead the guests upstairs, to finish the tour and show them the room they would occupy for the night.
The girl was reading on her bed, her feet knocking together in the air. She reported to the intruders that she’d been alone for some time now. Where the boy had gone, she had no idea.
A knot formed in the mother’s chest as they checked the bedrooms, the office, the bathroom. The father barked out the boy’s name. He couldn’t be far, the hosts smiled, the house wasn’t that big. The mother yanked open closet doors. Then she sailed down the staircase, calling, sensing the first creep of urgency. After the kitchen and dining room, disoriented, she paused in the hallway. She felt a draft, almost a current: the front door stood ajar.
One by one they filed into the fogged darkness, scanning the oddly shrouded stumps and uneven ground, their eyes keen for movement. The hosts, less easy now, called the boy’s name too, stepping into the cavernous barn and the shed, one of them returning to the house for flashlights. The father moved briskly, his cries blunted by the damp.
The mother started in one direction, then another, then a third, panting, her shoes smacking with suction in the muck. The knot in her chest swelled. The treetops began to dance. Something darted underfoot and she gasped as the frog flew, landing in the tall grass two feet away before springing into the air once more, and she raised her eyes beyond the frog, tracing forward in the direction of its jump, past the ducks standing by a log, beyond the mud, her gaze drawn into a stain of blackness, a broad and formless maw.
It was the pond, quiet and implacable.
And when she parted her lips, as if to whisper a word, a name, everything inside her gave way.
How lumpy the yard was, the hostess exclaimed later as she helped her friend scrape drying mud from her jeans. Practically dangerous! You could see how people would lose their footing.
This came after the boy turned up in the old pantry, asleep next to the cat, exhausted from the drive and the newness. His father made a show of scolding him, and after a silence that risked becoming too long, the other husband made the first joke, a feeble one, but that led to more talk as they moved to the dinner table. Kids used to run wild, someone said. But these days it’s all play-dates and art classes. What luck to have a hillside—practically a mountain—for a back yard! Don’t you think? Don’t you?
Yes, breathed the boy’s mother, nodding blankly. What luck.
Voices grew loud as the platters circulated. The host topped off glasses of wine. And with lavish servings of words, always more words, they labored to cover over the void of the pond, black and still.
Raised in the US and the UK, Scott Carpenter teaches literature and literary theory at Carleton College (MN). A writer of both fiction and non-fiction, he has published extensively on such topics as literary hoaxes and cultural studies, and his short fiction has appeared (or are about to) in such venues as Ducts, Prime Number, Spilling Ink, Every Writer Resource, Eunoia Review, Subtle Fiction, Anomalous, Short Fiction Collective, Lit-Cast and The Carleton Voice. His website is located at: apps.carleton.edu/people/scarpent/.
