You know she wants you to come into the water. 

          But all you dare to give her are your legs, dangling off the weather-frayed dock, splinters threatening

to invade the tender flesh beneath your knees. 

            Her fingers wrap around your ankle almost every afternoon during that July when you turn eleven, her grip plaintive but never quite demanding, while her hopeful face – round as the Moon Pie you break in half to share with her – breaches the brackish surface.

            She takes her portion of

the snack with a clammy hand, smiling as she stuffs it in her maw, minnows snatching the crumbs that scatter into the lake. She tries to thank you, but whatever parts of a girl that make up a voice are no longer there, her cold lips forming fruitless syllables.

            You do not know what a thing like her is called. You will not learn for years yet – a Russian word which you, at present, would not be able to pronounce, anyway. All you do know is that her strange, yet dependable presence is a balm to your unspeakable loneliness, like Rosebud Salve on cracked knuckles. It matters little to you that her existence is heresy, an aberration from the “great gulf fixed” that has been preached to you – that she somehow floats within that very gulf, extant in the rippling murk that lies between breath and oblivion.

          Your mother never sees her. You are not sure what would happen if she did, fearful of the fellowship she might forbid you. But when the revenant visits, you feel selected – special – amidst an awkward year wherein it seems like you’re in everyone else’s way. You don’t want to lose the one true friend you have, even if her skin has gone pale and translucent as the plexiglass in the sliding shower door upstairs. 

          You take a sip of your RC Cola, flicking an ant off the rim of

the bottle before bringing it to your mouth, and she tugs your ankle again. She gazes up at you, rheumy eyes ripe with expectation as you gift her the rest of the soda, and even as a child you recognize by the undisguised bliss in her waterlogged features that this is a flavor

she remembers.

            You tell her about school sometimes, about your arithmetic lessons and your “feelings folders,” about how your glasses got broken during dodgeball, but you never tell her your most important secret: that you know who she is, or rather who she was.

            You know because your mother spends all of her hours outside of her shifts at the clinic taking care of Memaw, her grandmother, who most of the time cannot remember your name and sometimes not even her own. Your mother is “covered up.” There is a persistent twitch in her left eyelid these days. People are putting her on prayer lists. This – the meticulous, seemingly interminable attendance of Memaw – was supposed to be someone else’s job. But your grandmother Lurleen “got the cancer” before you were born, so the vigil falls to those who remain.

            When your mother makes it known that she needs a break (“Godamighty I’m fixin’ to bust a gasket”), you sit with Memaw, answering to anything she calls you. Often, she totters through the past, telling you over and over about the little sister she lost. She holds a framed picture of the girl, standing by a barn in a Sunday dress and apron, and in a tremulous voice she croons:

 

          “Say, say oh playmate, 

          Come out and play with me,  

          And bring your dollies three, 

          Climb up my apple tree.         

 

          Slide down my rain barrel,    

          Into my cellar door,    

          And we'll be jolly friends,      

          Forever more…”

​

          The first time you examined the photograph, the pane of glass splattered with tears, you knew the girl. You knew exactly what that round face of hers looked like through water, those ever-watching green eyes, the skin, now nearly colorless, rendered there in decaying sepia. And you knew that, although she no longer had any blood, what blood she once possessed was the same as yours – that she came to you, again and again, because she knew you were her people. 

            You looked her up in the library, using what the lady behind the desk called “microfish,” and it was all in archaic newsprint: the families evicted from their homes by the Tennessee Valley Authority when the dams were built, the day the holler was flooded to make the lake, and the stubborn child who, in a fit of pique, ran away from her parents back to her old house, not understanding the uncaring deluge that would come – the body which they never found to bury.

            You stay awake too long, listening to the peepers and cicadas, staring with burgeoning guilt at your Rocky and Bullwinkle night light, and you realize she had to die for this power – for this illumination you have long taken for granted. That progress is a graph on your teacher’s chalkboard, but it is also a grind – and that somebody’s bones are always stuck between the gears. 

            So even if your mother does find you, her screeches echoing off the side of the mountain, or even if your only friend does try to pull you underneath one day, you will still share this communion. You will watch the way her mud-soaked strands of hair stick to the skim milk pallor of her flesh as she sucks the bits of chocolate and marshmallow off her wrinkled fingers, and when she swims in a circle and mouths the words to a song you cannot hear but know by heart –

​

          “Say, say oh playmate, 

          Come out and play with me..."

​

          – you will sing along, holding the rusalka’s hand, frigid as the grave even in the ruthless thick of July, before your mother calls you up to help count out the pills for Memaw’s tray.

            It is the least that you can do.