The Window To Nowhere

There are eels under the house.

Growing up at the lake, whenever my brother and I dashed to the water to swim, my father would always shout after us. Be careful or the eels will bite off your toes! My brother, Oscar, had caught one once while fishing from the deck. He’d put it in a bucket and we watched it knotting itself over and over, filling up the bucket with stinking greyish slime. It was gross enough to convince us that the eels were indeed best avoided. But I’d had no idea how many there were, swarms of them lurking in unseen places.

This unwelcome knowledge is my father’s doing. He’s always been one for weird ideas and now that mom is dead, there’s nobody to stop him following through on them. He's at the mercy of whatever urge compels him to strap on his tool belt.

“You put a porthole in the floor?” I say doubtfully, when I see his latest effort. He’s installed it in the living room where the coffee table used to be. He flicks a switch by the TV and spotlights come on to illuminate the glass. On the other side of the window, eels swirl away from the light like ribbons of ink.

My father shrugs his broad shoulders and runs a hand through his hair as if puzzled by it himself. “Your mother would have liked it. She loved the aquarium.”

His eyes, puffy and bloodshot with grief, are the aquamarine of tropical waters in travel brochures. Those were the kind of places that had glass floors – overwater bungalows in Bora Bora and the Maldives, places with crystalline water and rainbow reefs. The view of a lake bed in Colorado is less luxurious. There is only murk and drifting weeds and the small multitude of eels writhing between the stilts of the house.

“Can you see the tadpoles, Elsie?” My father asks softly. My little girl is peering down through the glass, anxious and entranced.

“Are there tadpoles?” I ask. Surely to God, not even the nimblest and most determined tadpole could survive in such infested waters.

My father grins. “Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe they were leeches.”

At his words, my daughter squirms. Elsie's fear is plain on her little face. She edges carefully away from the porthole, freaked out. My father squats beside her and taps the glass with a thick forefinger. It makes a hollow sound. “Maybe we’ll see Nessie, eh?” he says to her, and she comes over shy. She tucks her chubby chin into her chest and giggles.

“The Loch Ness Monster is in Scotland, Dad.”

"How do you know, kid? Maybe she can teleport.”

Elsie objects to this. “No, Grandpappy! She can’t teleport!”

“No?” Dad acts surprised by her outburst. His voice takes on a gentle, dangerous tone. “An expert now, are you, little one? Like your mother, you know everything. Well, I say Nessie’s a monster and monsters can do whatever they want!”

He lunges and catches Elsie up in his arms.

“No!” She wriggles.

“Yes!” Dad counters and tosses her up, catches her again. He informs her, “Now I’m going to dunk you in the lake.”

Elsie’s squeals are shrill. Leeches and eels and monsters are fresh in her head, but Dad marches her outside to the deck, stands at the railing and tips her over so her long strands of blonde hair cloud in the water like pondweed. She’s breathless with laughter.

When I was small, he played that same game with me. His arms are like steel pylons. It never even occurred to me that he might drop me in. Elsie’s face was as carefree. It doesn’t occur to her either. Only the tips of her hair get wet.

*

The river that feeds the lake runs down from the mountains and is ice-melt cold. In summer, the lake is teeming with reeds and ducks and dragonflies. In the winter, it freezes over thick enough to skate on. Now in April, its waters are swollen and black. The house was built by my father. He made it with his own hands. It’s suspended on stilts out on the water with a long spit of land connecting it to shore like a bridge. It has a wrap-around deck, and a jetty with a little rowing boat. He built it all for my mother and now he lives there by himself.

It’s been three months. We’re trying to adjust. Dad keeps telling me I don’t need to keep visiting to check on him. I keep coming anyway. Something tells me it’s a good idea.

When night falls, I tuck Elsie into bed in the smallest bedroom. She’s reluctant because she wants to go out rowing in the little boat. It’s late and cold, and she doesn't care that she's already in her pyjamas. They're red and pink check with daisies embroidered on the sleeves. They're very pretty, Dad tells her, but not warm enough for boating on the lake in. He promises her pancakes in the morning if she goes to bed. I creep out of her room after she’s fallen asleep and shut the door.

My father is standing at the window in the lounge, staring out across the water. The lake stretches away into the night and the sky is wide and empty of everything but the moon. It tips the mountains in silver and casts a glimmering a path onto silent water. The world feels deserted but for the two of us and Elsie asleep in her room. Though, I suppose, now that I'm aware of them, the small host of eels lurking under our feet have a sort of a presence too. Yuck. I try not to think about it.

My father is holding a tumbler of whiskey. When he sees me, he hesitates and asks, “Do you mind if I drink?”

I shake my head. “By all means.”

“You won't get crazy and try to wrestle it away from me?”

“I don’t think you understand how alcoholism works.”

I go to peer through the porthole. The lights are off and it’s impossible to see anything. The glass is pitch black. The soles of my feet tingle as if I’m up somewhere high, toes to the edge of a precipice. There could be all sorts of things on the other side of that window, squirming around. Not just eels, perhaps. Unknown things that live unseen where nobody thinks to look.

“It’s dark down there, isn’t it?” my father asks. He sits down on the sofa with a heavy sigh and smiles in a worn-out way. His accent – Norwegian, and still strong after all this time living in America – is thicker when he’s tired. “What’s that saying? If you look into the void...it stares back...or something? Look it up, kid.”

I sigh, but he won’t let it rest until he knows. My phone screen flashes on, vulgar in its brightness. I tap into Google, then read out: “Friedrich Nietzsche. Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

“That’s the one." He nods, thoughtfully. Then he says, “I’ve put an eye into the floor of my house.”

“Ew, dad,” I protest, casting an uneasy glance at the window in the floor. It's fathomless and shimmering, but nothing like an eye. “Don’t be creepy.”

“I’ll be creepy if I want to be creepy.” He tips his head back against the sofa to gaze listlessly at the ceiling, his iron-coloured hair crushing up against the fabric. He swirls his whiskey glass, the amber liquid wallows. “The lake has eyes, huh? Like the movie.”

“It’s The Hills Have Eyes.”

“Whatever! Just like your mother, always correcting.” He brushes me off with a wave of his hand, irritation made false by the affection in his words. Then abruptly, he sobs.

“Dad?”

He takes several deep breaths. “Sorry! Sorry. I just miss her, kid.”

I sit with him and we talk about mom for a while. Her absence in our world is like a hole in our souls and it presses in on us both. After a while, my father heaves himself to his feet and kisses me roughly on the top of my head, just like he used to do when I was little. “I’m going to bed. Good night, kid.”

“Night, dad.”

The house creaks as he sets his half-drunk glass of whiskey on the sideboard and disappears down the hall to his room. I hear him settling for the night and then it’s very quiet. Sleep is a long way away. I could go to bed too, but it would mean lying awake for endless hours, listening to the lake lap against the stilts and thinking painfully of mom. I don’t want to be alone with those thoughts just yet. Instead, I switch on the TV and turn the volume low for company.

Then I go in my purse to get the pills.

I've been having trouble sleeping lately. I have a prescription. It's fine.

I take two Ambien and wait for them to kick in. The light from the TV bounces on the glass of the porthole. The shifting reflections make it look as though shapeless things are moving beneath it.

My father’s words about it being like the eye of an abyss pop back into my head. I shake them off but the thought niggles at me, tugging on the threads of my imagination, like a fish on a line. I catch myself staring at the porthole instead of the TV. I feel safer as long as I’m watching it. But that’s ridiculous. I drag my gaze away.

There’s something in the back of my mind that refuses to leave it be. Every time I look away, I'm overcome by the urge to look back. Something is there. It's waiting for me to see it. When I look again it'll be there; an eye as big as a dinner plate, perhaps, pressed up against the window from the darkness underneath, staring right back at me. As if the house is balanced above bottomless depths and Nessie really might be down there. The urge to look is unbearable. Reluctance paralyzes me. I dart a last nervous glance, and see nothing. The window is empty of horrors. It's empty of everything. It's just black.

It's not long before the pills kick in and I fall fast asleep.

I wake still on the sofa to somebody tugging on my hand. It’s Elsie. The room is golden bright with midday sun. It must be nearly noon, way later than I’d meant to wake up.

Elsie’s hair is sleep-tousled and her face looks all wrong. It’s twisted up, unhappy. My heart flutters with alarm. “What’s the matter, sweetie? Did Grandpappy make you your pancakes?”

She shakes her head, that awful twisted-up look growing deeper on her face. I put my hand out to touch her. She says, “He won't wake up, Mommy.”

“What?” A flash of lightening in my blood, of panic. “What do you mean, honey?” My voice is sharper than I mean for it to be. She doesn’t answer right away. I grab her arm.

Elsie starts to cry.

I scramble off the sofa and run, run, run to my father’s room.

*

The paramedics say it was likely a heart attack that killed him, sometime in the night. It must have happened in his sleep. He may or may not have woken up. If he called out for help, I wouldn’t have heard it. The sleeping pills...

They take his body in the ambulance. They tell me there’s no point in going to the hospital with them. They advise me to call someone because I shouldn’t be alone right now.

I've put Elsie down for a nap. She’s upset but doesn’t really understand what’s happening or where Grandpappy has gone. She’s too young.

I need to call Oscar. I need to call my ex so he can pick Elsie up. It’s not his weekend but my father just died. He’s going to have to change his plans. I have arrangements to make.

I need to call Oscar.

Oh god, I can’t do this again. Not yet. Not ever. Definitely not now.

I really shouldn’t be alone right now.

The half-drunk glass of whiskey that my father had left on the sideboard is still there. I pick it up. There’s a mark his mouth had made on the rim of the glass. What’s left of the whiskey is warm and there’s a mosquito floating in it. Without thinking at all, I knock it back.

I pour another glass, shaking. One more, to settle my nerves. My father is dead. I have to call my brother. It's going to be awful.

I pour a third glass.

I just want numbness. To feel nothing. To be lost in fog.

A fourth.

Perhaps there’s a fifth or sixth, but I don’t remember anything else.

*

I wake with an empty whiskey bottle cradled in my arms. Elsie is tugging on my hand again. “Mommy. I want to go and play in the boat. You said we could. You promised.” She sounds pouty. Whiny. I push her off.

“No love, not now. I’m sleeping.” I fumble around in the cushions, find the pill bottle. I don’t even know how many I take.

“Mommy,” she says, but if she says anything after that, it’s lost on me. I slide back into the fog.

*

I hear the front door opening and closing. Oscar, I think. Or Elsie’s dad coming to pick her up. I roll over and go back to sleep.

*

It’s night. The sky beyond the window is full dark, no stars.

“Elsie?” My voice is hoarse. My mouth is gluey and dry. I don’t know how long I’ve been out of it. My head is pounding, throbbing. I need to vomit.

Elsie doesn’t answer.

The room is dark. I drag myself off the sofa and fumble for the light switch. I hit the wrong one and the lights around the porthole come on. It’s not the light I wanted, but it's just about bright enough to see by. Elsie’s not in the room. I go out to the deck but she’s not there either. Neither is the boat.

Then I remember: Her dad has her. I heard them leave. He came to pick her up.

Why didn’t he wake me?

I stumble back into the house and collapse on the sofa, groping for my phone. The world spins and I slide to the floor. The whiskey bottle rolls away, fetches up against the porthole. I fumble with my phone, manage to get the screen to light up somehow. No calls or texts.

Wait.

I swallow down bile. Rest my head in my hands for just a second, then start awake.

I check my outgoing calls.

There’s nothing since I called my dad to tell him we were going to visit. I haven't called Oscar yet to tell him about dad. I never called Elsie’s dad, either. Nobody picked her up.

It’s late so she must have put herself to bed. I need to check on her. I stagger over to the porthole to pick the whiskey bottle up. The dizziness swells, and all of a sudden, I’m on my hands and knees. Nausea swells up my throat, my vision goes foggy. I sit and wait for it to pass. I stare absently at the porthole.

There’s something in it.

What kind of weed is that? It’s stringy and yellow, floating in a cloud. I’ve seen pondweeds like it before. Dragging across the surface. Something else catches my eye. A corner of cloth pressed to the glass, checkered red and pink. I’ve seen that pattern before. There’s a tiny embroidered flower. White with yellow in the middle.

It’s a daisy.

She's floating face-down, blonde hair drifting like weeds, in her pretty pyjamas with daisies on the sleeves.

I’m screaming.

I scream until my throat is raw. I taste blood. I hammer with both fists on the glass and it doesn’t crack. Doesn’t budge. I drag myself up, stagger to the bookcase. There are bookends perched on the shelves, heavy and steel. I use one of those.

The glass doesn’t shatter. It crumbles inward, bit by bit, with every blow. It slices my fingers because there’s blood. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel any of it. When all the glass is gone, there’s a hole. The smell of the lake, of cold, dead water, rises up through it.

Dad was right. I see it now.

It’s an eye. It’s an eye, a great, oily black eye, and it’s staring right at me.

It watches me without a flicker of anything at all. It is lifeless and empty, like a shark’s eye – there is nothing in it. Only absence. Only darkness, with no light and no end.

I reach into it and grope for Elsie. Her lifeless fingers brush mine as if she’s reaching for me. I clasp at them, but she’s drifting deeper. Something else has her, something is pulling her down to the bottom. I hold on tightly. There is no fight in me. They drag her down and take me with her.

The water is black and icy and bloodless. We sink through weeds and silence. We settle into mud and silt with the eels. They slither and wind, ropes of cold and slimy flesh. There must be tens. Hundreds. Thousands.

My vision is going dark. The very last of the light is going out. I hold on to Elsie, tight.

The eels glide past my face, slide against my skin, nudge at the tips of my fingers and toes.

They bite.