The Shape Past the Trees

The wrongness didn't leave with morning. It changed address. In the daylight it was quieter, easier to argue away, and I tried to argue it away the way you do, the way you have to, to keep living in a place. The lake was beautiful. The sky was clear. Eli was alive. We unpacked the new groceries from the second, sober run we made in daylight, and I made coffee and stood on the porch drinking it and watching the water and telling myself I had been five days without sleep and a body on a road will do things to a person's head and that was all that was happening to my head.

Eli felt it too. I could tell. He was quieter than his quiet, checking the locks again even in daylight, walking the perimeter of the yard like he was measuring it, standing at the tree line and looking in. There were boot prints in the soft earth at the edge of the pines. Big ones. Deep, like someone had stood there a long time. Deer don't leave boot prints. Eli knelt beside them and didn't say anything for a long time and then he stood up and came back to the porch and said, "We should keep the doors locked. Even when we're home."

"They said they had a person of interest," Mae said from the doorway, hopeful.

"They said person of interest," Eli said. "They didn't say caught."

Theo came out then, coffee in hand, and looked at the boot prints too, and his face did nothing, the nothing it always did, and he said, "They're a big size," which was a strange thing to notice and a strange thing to say, and then he went back inside, and I watched him go, and a thought crossed my mind and I let it cross and did not catch it.

The day passed in a held breath. We swam, because the lake was there and the sun was there and we were trying, all of us, very hard, to be the four people we'd been when we'd planned the trip. The water was cold and dark and felt good after the heat and the fear, and for an hour, treading water together, the four of us, it almost worked. Mae floated on her back and Theo held her up with one hand and Eli held me against his chest and the sky was enormous above us. For an hour it was just a lake and we were just people in it.

Then I swam to the dock and pulled myself up and turned around and saw the cottage - the porch, the windows, the leaning pine - and behind the cottage, at the tree line, in the gap between two pines where the boot prints were, a shape standing, and I froze.

Just for a second. One second. A stand of person-shape in the green shadow. Then I blinked and it was a shadow, only a shadow, a trick of light and pine and my five unslept nights. I told myself that. I told myself that hard. I said nothing to the others, because I had used up my right to say I saw something with five days of saying I felt watched, and because I wanted, badly, to be wrong.

But I kept looking at the gap between the pines for the rest of the swim, and the gap was empty, and the empty felt full, and when we went back inside for the evening I made sure Eli locked the door behind us and I checked it myself after him, and he saw me do it and didn't say anything, just put his hand on the back of my neck, warm, and the day ended with the door locked and the lights on and the four of us trying not to look out the windows at the dark that had come back, the same dark, with a new patience in it, like whatever was in it had learned, over five days, exactly which window to watch.