Jade tries to force this into a statement that makes sense.
But then all at once it does: the swan boat, the one Deacon Samuels was playing on in that memorial slideshow. They have to wade out to it, then Letha has to push and pull to get it unmired, but it’s whole. The only boat over here that is.
Jade looks around to Letha to confirm that they’re doing this, but Letha’s gone. Jade spins around, about to panic, which is when Letha bursts up from the water, still trying to wash her face.
Jade follows suit, lowering herself under the surface in what she hopes is a more menacing fashion, swishing left to right, coming up to breathe, then doing it again, and again, until she feels halfway clean. Clean enough for a massacre.
Letha’s already up in the boat’s fiberglass couple’s seat. She holds her hand down, hauls Jade’s wet heavy self up as easy as anything, the swan boat tilting and rocking, but there’s no hull for water to slosh over, really, no bottom to have to bail out.
Just a footspace for water to wash across, run down. Jade clomps her heavy boots down into that slurry, watches the lake run red around her feet, then clear.
“You should—” Letha says, about Jade’s boots. “If we end up having to swim, I mean.”
Jade looks down at her combat boots, the ones she pulled on for battle each morning of the war called “high school.” But Letha’s right. She should have kicked them off last night, really. That’s why Letha was able to swim so much faster than her. Well, that’s one reason.
She unlaces them, works them off, sets them gently down into the lake. It takes them as it takes everything it’s offered.
“The—” Letha says then, pulling at the nonexistent zipper over her chest, which is her way of saying maybe Jade should leave her coveralls behind as well?
Jade shakes her head no. Letha might look more killer with each article of clothing she loses, but Jade needs these, at the very least. She gathers her hand over the collars, pulling them together like fighting to keep them on.
“I feel like we’re going to get noticed in this,” she says about the swan boat.
“Good,” Letha says, and starts churning them through the water.
Jade tries to figure out how to place her feet on the spinning pedals, pitch in.
There’s a steering wheel of sorts—a joystick with a big white fiberglass egg for a handle, that must be connected to a rudder under the sweeping-back tail.
“Not exactly how I envisioned my return,” Jade mumbles.
“Black swan fit you better?” Letha says, not quite with a smile—this isn’t a time for that—but it shows she’s waking up a little anyway.
“Ever done this before?” Jade asks. “Pedaled across?”
“We’ll make it,” Letha says, and pedals harder, surging them forward for a few feet. “Isn’t this where… you know,”
she asks, sort of.
Jade rotates her left wrist up so her scar’s right there.
“It didn’t want me,” she says. “The lake, I mean.”
“Why not?”
“There’s this preacher Ezekiel down there, purifying the water,” Jade says. “It makes this a Christian burial ground, and, you know. I’m Indian.”
“You and your dad.”
To try to head this off, stop Letha’s accusations before they can rev up, Jade says, “I’m sorry about your—your stepmom,”
Jade says. “She didn’t deserve that. None of them did.”
“I should have burned the whole place down months ago,”
Letha says. “We never should have come here.”
“I’m glad you did,” Jade can’t help but say. “I mean, tragedy aside and all.”
Letha’s hand comes off the steering egg, finds the top of Jade’s for a quick sisterly squeeze. Jade looks across the dark water to Camp Blood, lurking on Indian Lake’s shore like an infection, like a bad memory.
Theo Mondragon’s about to be walking through it, isn’t he?
And maybe pulling all its ghosts in behind him.
“Along with my axe,” Jade adds to that visual.
Letha comes back with, “Say what?”
Jade shakes her head no, nothing. It’s just what she thinks would look coolest, dragging behind a slasher who’s limping across the narrow whiteness of Glen Dam: the heavy long-handled two-bit axe she buried over there, once upon a runaway night. But, axe or no, if he’s going to make it, he needs to get to hopping to make an appearance before the movie’s over, right?