To her immediate right, bleary and blurry but clearing up, too many Proofrockers are on Lonnie’s raft, and it’s sinking, the upright-again lamp flickering yellow somehow.
And the screaming, god. Jade can hardly hear herself think.
Every mouth is open, and every second face is Stacey Graves —this night isn’t a night, it’s a series of heart attacks waiting to happen.
Jade finally fixes on her father, standing unmolested in his boat, his left hand to the toy saber strapped to his belt—aisle 3, Family Dollar—his right clutching the neck of his beer bottle.
In the water at his feet is Alison Chambers, floating faceup, her chest leaking out into the lake. From that bass boat’s illegal motor? But… how does that motor explain Jocelyn Cates’s husband’s jaw being ripped off, especially when that jaw being ripped off came before that outboard even fired up?
There’s Judd Tambor standing in the water, holding a child up above the fray, the image of that wavering in Jade’s head with the image of him at graduation, holding a kid above his head just the same, everybody clapping for her.
They’re not clapping now, even though she was right about everything.
She backs up, feeling the water behind her first, and her fingertips find warmth.
Jade turns and the warmth is the inside of Misty Christy’s chest. Misty Christy’s daughter, the one Jade saved from the bus, is treading water while trying to hold her mom’s head up, but it doesn’t matter if Misty Christy’s airways are clear anymore or not.
Jade pulls Misty Christy across to her.
“Go!” she tells the daughter, “find the sheriff, I’ll keep her safe!”
The girl is about to cry, this is too much, but after a moment more of treading water, she turns, is a minnow cutting for shore, for the sheriff, for someone to save her mom.
Jade lets Misty Christy drift away, and has to swish her hand in the water to clear the blood. Dan Dan the mailman rises up under her hand, his bald head a nervous periscope, the pole vaulter’s pole slips past like a rigid snake, and then some float is jouncing Jade forward. She looks back to who hit her.
It’s Dorothy, of Dot’s. She’s holding on to the innertube she has made up like a coffee cup, like every year. Holding on and thrashing. She latches onto Jade, pulls herself up with Jade’s shoulder, which is when Jade sees Dorothy’s face.
The right eye is gone, and a good chunk of the skull, too.
Jade flinches back, gulps bloody water in and swallows it before she can tell herself not to.
Because it’s too crazy up here on the surface, she lowers everything but her eyes under, pulls from this boat to that boat, coasting through either blood or Jell-O. Her main hope now is to drift unobserved to the edge of this, and then float quietly out into deeper, more hidden waters. Except—her feet are tangling in something? She jerks, pulls, finally has to just duck under, see.
It’s spokes. Of a wheelchair.
Mr. Holmes.
In this comparative calmness, she studies the water around her but can’t even see past her hands. All the blood, all the silt, all the bubbles. When she comes up she’s instantly swamped by she’s not sure what—somebody cannonballing in? getting thrown in?—and when she clears her eyes, there’s Mr. Holmes right in front of her, trying to float on his back, but the lake is going in and out of his mouth, and his cast is heavy, trying to pull him down.
His head’s been opened at his hairline, about, probably from the prow of the bass boat, is spilling dates and history out into the water. His twitching left hand finds her right, and Jade pulls him to her, looking around for what she can protect him from.
He looks over to her, spits the water from his mouth and smiles, says, “Jenn— Jennifer.”
“Jade,” Jade says back to him, her eyes hot and crying now.
“I—I—” he sputters.
His left hand finds the back of her head. He runs his fingers across her stubble and she pushes back against this touch, shaking her head no but holding his hand all the same.
A spasm passes across him: his head injury. His brain, failing.
Jade pulls him closer, tries to hold him higher.
“Just, just—” she says. “We can, I’ll get you—”
It was a lie when she said it to Misty Christy’s daughter, though, and it’s a lie now.
The corners of Mr. Holmes’s eyes crinkle like he appreciates the effort.
“Will she or won’t she what?” he manages to get out, and the massacre they’re in becomes just mute backdrop for the moment, a movie going on in the next theater over.