Page 113 of The Deepest Lake

“Meet Eva for dinner, maybe,” Lindsay says.

“I don’t want to wait that long.”

Rose presses send and keeps the window open, watching her inbox.

“If she’ll meet with me, I’ll start gently.”

“About Rachel’s workshop?”

“About more than that.” Rose feels nervous, but excited, too. “Maybe Eva feels just as insecure as the rest of us and she’d prefer real feedback, for once. The people who question her tactics are usually the first to leave. How can she figure it out if people don’t stick around and tell her?”

“Oh, Rose.”

“What?”

“You’re a sweeter and more optimistic person than I am.”

And there it is: the reply email in bold. Rose clicks. Meet now. Time to talk and swim.

Eva seems spacy when Rose gets to the dock, almost as if she’s forgotten that she just emailed Rose.

“You wanted information about Rachel,” Rose prompts her. “I thought I could help.”

“Right,” Eva says, dropping the towel she’s carried to the dock from the house. “So, tell me. How did Rachel seem to you, day before yesterday?”

“Motivated. I think the workshop was challenging. At first, she had good things to say about it—”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Eva says. Then sploosh! She’s in the water, headfirst, swimming confidently away from shore. After a half dozen strokes, she turns around. “Water’s fine!”

“Couldn’t we talk a little more up here, on the dock?”

“A cleansing dip first. Clear the brain, open the heart. Nothing better than water to do that.”

Rose lowers herself to a squat, reaching toward the water with her fingertips.

Eva blows a raspberry. “Don’t dither. Just dive in!”

Growing up along the shore of Lake Michigan, Rose never liked swimming. Pools, sometimes, but even then, she preferred to walk down the steps into the children’s shallow end first. On vacation, she was happier with hot tubs. It was her fault Jules was equally timid around oceans and lakes. When Jules was eight years old, they made her suffer through a month of park district swimming lessons but once Jules could doggy paddle for two solid pool lengths, Rose and Matt let her quit.

Eva disappears and comes back up again, smoothing her hair back. “Faster is better, always. Lake swimming and writing have a lot in common.”

Of course, Rose has a special hatred for this particular lake. But it’s time to stop giving the lake—and Eva—so much power. The lake isn’t dangerous, it’s just deep. Eva doesn’t mean to damage women, she’s just misguided. Every session, another dozen women have witnessed her tactics. But how many have confronted Eva, letting her know that for every writer she’s helping, another woman has been damaged?

Rose jumps. She resurfaces, sputtering, and breaststrokes toward Eva, who waits for her with a know-it-all smile.

“I figured you’d be a slow starter.”

“Yes,” Rose says, “I’m not so good with cold water,” still getting her breath, ignoring the warning voice in her head, focusing instead on that other internal message. Confront her. Tell her that what she did to Rachel and Scarlett was wrong. And when that’s been covered, tell her that she already knows what happened to Jules. It isn’t about asking questions anymore, because Eva is an unreliable narrator even when she’s trying to tell the truth.

“You’ll warm up,” Eva says. Her tone seems friendlier. “We haven’t had our private session. This is good. But first: Rachel.”

Eva floats on her back, kicking away from shore. Rose follows, wondering how far Eva will go. Why not stroke parallel to land instead of away from it?

It’s less glassy out here, away from the protection of the points curving out from either side of Eva’s property. On the dock they were surrounded by tropical birds, roosting in the bluff’s bushes, a morning chorus. When Rose starts to sink, ears just below water level but mouth still above, straining for air, that music ceases. In its place she hears her own shallow breath and something else, faint but high-pitched. Ticking, clicking. Buzzing. Shrimp? Fish? Distant motors?

Eva says, “Somebody saw Rachel drinking the night before last, at the pizzeria. She heard the siren call of her old vices.”

“She needed a crutch. She was doing something hard.” Rose has to speak in short sentences, struggling for air between them. “Writing hard scenes involving her children.”