Page 10 of What You Never Knew

You can is the response I hear back. I think I might actually be losing it, but imagining my sister’s voice and encouraging words does helps. My heart is no longer racing, and I have a somewhat renewed sense of confidence.

I go back inside and head right to the kitchen. The big, beige fridge is unplugged, and the door is propped open with a piece of wood. Inside is empty except for mouse droppings and, yet again, black mold. I bend down and plug it into the wall, but nothing happens. I flick the kitchen light switch, and again nothing happens. The main power must be off.

Just for the hell of it, I go to the kitchen sink and give the tap a try, releasing an angry hiss of air. So before anything can happen, I have to get the power on and the water working. Nothing unexpected, but I still feel like a child sent in to do an adult’s job. Being the youngest meant there was always someone ahead of me to take charge, to boss me around and make things happen.

Now I’m the only one left, and I can’t help but feel like it shouldn’t have been me. I was the fuck-up in the family, the scattered one who rarely saw anything through to the end, who always tried to get out of any responsibility. How on earth am I supposed to handle all of this?

I pull my phone from my pocket. I’ve already been here for an hour and gotten nothing accomplished. A photo of my daughters is my lock screen. I stare at their faces until I feel like an adult again—their mere existence a reminder that I’ve been in charge somewhere in my life, so why not here as well?

In the storage room at the very back of the cottage is the fuse panel. Our reserves are still lined up neatly on the wooden shelves—cans of food, matches, a few bottles of French wine, cleaning products. Pulling open the door to the fuse panel, I see that the main fuse block has been taken out. I find it sitting beside the metal box that contains spare fuses, fit it into place, and push hard, grateful for the first time that my mother made both me and May learn how everything in this cottage worked.

She was militant about it. “If you partake in the enjoyment of the place, you must also take on the responsibility of caring for it,” she said time and time again, when we were made to wash the windows, scrub the floors, weed the garden, change blown fuses, prepare the place for winter. The caretaker, West, did most of the yard work and fixed things now and again, but she insisted on doing the majority of it herself. Like a protective mother whose baby was a cottage, she just couldn’t stop fussing.

I pull the chord of the bare lightbulb hanging above me and almost cry out in joy when it fills with light. Back in the kitchen, I’m greeted with the gentle hum of the refrigerator.

Encouraged by my first success, I look for the key to the pump room. The next task—getting the water turned on. If I can manage that, I can pretty much manage anything.

MAY

We’re back on Avril Island. The fact hit me as soon as I surfaced next to June and saw the familiar green boards of the cottage, the metal glider sitting rusted on the front verandah, the thick forest circling the expanse of lawn.

June was screaming at the trees. I could feel her loneliness, her despair and desperation. It flooded me like sewage water. I don’t know if it was seeing June suffering or if there was more to it, but surfacing there on Avril Island made me uneasy, anxious. It was the first time I’d had those emotions since dying.

Instinctively I spoke some encouraging words to her, which of course came out as weighted silence. I willed her to be brave, which I’m pretty sure she felt, because she stopped screaming, shifted her shoulders back, and marched inside. I moved with her.

It was obvious from the state of the place that nobody had been there for a very long time. I couldn’t remember why. I spread myself out into the pine walls and down into the floorboards. There was a stillness and an emptiness that can only be found in buildings that have been uninhabited for a long time. I was sure I felt sadness trapped there in the bones of the place. Wanting to escape it, I quickly pulled myself back together and out of the depths of the lonely old building.

June was down on her hands and knees to scrub the inside of the fridge. How long did she plan on staying? I wondered. Why had she come back all on her own?

Independent ventures weren’t like June. I’d be lying to say I wasn’t surprised that she’d come all this way alone, managed to drive a boat, to get the water running, to be in this much solitude. I was proud of her but at the same time confused and a bit concerned.

I spent the afternoon watching June clean and unpack food that she’d brought, drinking glasses of wine along the way. She stopped only once to eat some carrots and celery, a little something to absorb the alcohol but not nearly enough to nourish her. She’d turned from curves to angles since I’d died. Her bones were more pronounced than ever. Eventually she put on her swimsuit, opened a new bottle of wine, refilled her glass, and headed down the path to the lake.

The sun had set the sky orange and the breeze was gone, leaving the lake a sheet of dark glass. June dipped one toe in and cringed. The lake doesn’t really warm up until mid-July, so it must be earlier than that. She dropped the towel and, before she could lose her nerve, pushed off the dock into a graceful dive, disappearing into the deep water.

June had always plunged right in, cannonballing as a young child, diving when she got good at that. I’d always waded in slowly from the shore, introducing each body party to the water until I was up to my neck and then finally acclimatized enough to drop under the surface. An accurate analogy of our personalities all through life, I now realize.

As she sat on the dock after her swim, her eyes locked on the evolution of sunset before her, tears slowly began to slide down her cheeks. She didn’t wipe them away. I knew those tears were for me and I couldn’t do a thing about it, which felt more painful than any death.

Fortunately, she didn’t sit long with the grief. She drained what was left in her glass and got up to make her way back to the cottage. Inside she poured herself another glass, set it carefully down on the coffee table, and then flopped onto the couch with a tired groan.

Now her eyes slowly roll closed, and she turns onto her side and curls up into a ball, not even bothering to discard the damp towel. My mother would have been mortified to see her on the couch in her wet bathing suit. I can almost hear her: June Bennett, you get off that couch right now and into dry clothes. Sacré bleu! My mother always added a French curse at the end of a scolding. It was involuntary, she said.

June begins to snore softly. It’s been almost a full day, and I’m still here. Maybe I’m getting stronger. Maybe soon I won’t disappear at all. It’s hard to say, and I still don’t understand it at all.

I’m not really sure what to do with myself now that June is sleeping. As if I’m testing a new superpower, I start to slowly drift away from the couch, moving first into the kitchen. A mouse is chewing into the plastic of the bag of bread that sits out on the counter but stops suddenly with my arrival and quickly skitters through a thin crack in the wooden paneling of the wall. Was it a mere coincidence, or could it sense me?

Moonlight streams into the picture window that looks out onto the backyard. Passing through it, I feel a strange tug, as though I suddenly have some density to me, so I stop and linger there, enjoying the sensation of it. Thinking this must be how a child learning the world for the first time feels, not sure what anything really means, finding new sensations at every turn with no background information to apply.

When I leave the patch of moonlight, I feel light again, as though a strong wind could blow me apart. I have to mentally pull myself together before moving into the dining room. There’s no moonlight here to play in or mice to scare, and it’s got a shadowy, hollow feeling that I don’t like, so I keep going.

Wanting to try going even farther afield, I will myself up the stairs.

It’s dark up here, but I can still see everything clearly. The doors to our bedrooms are closed, but my parents’ room sits open, and the gentle breeze moving through the hallway pushes me in that direction.

It’s obvious from the state of the bedroom that we left in a hurry. There are still clothes in the closet and things scattered across the dresser top. Right on cue, the sight of the room brings on the memory of our departure that last summer.

We packed up only the clothing we could carry, filled garbage bags with the remaining food, which would be taken to the dump, and then loaded my mother’s boat until it sunk low in the water.