Esther Hollow's Arc

Chapter 10 of 8

The other woman was free, but the water still tugged at Esther's chest. She stood on the wet rocks and felt the old pull toward the lighthouse, cold and steady, the same as every night for eleven years. Jen knelt in the mud beside the fresh grave, catching her breath. "You're still here," Jen said. "You didn't go up like she did." Esther nodded. Freeing the drowned woman had not freed her. Something else held her chained. Jen wiped her hands on her jeans and stood. "Then we're missing something. What do you still owe? Think." Esther searched the memory of her death. The flood. The dogs in the crate. The cats locked outside. She had freed them all. But one thing came back now, sharp and small. Before the water rose, she had carried something out here. Pictures. A stack of framed pictures from the hotel's little show house by the shore. "There was a show house," Esther said, and Jen repeated it aloud so the memory grew. A spooky playhouse the hotel kept for guests, its front trimmed with carved shapes, a red curtain over its arch. Esther had hidden a bundle inside it the night she drowned. "I put something there. To keep it dry. I never came back." They crossed the water again, Jen holding the glowing plant, and found the show house near the boathouse. Its curtain hung rotted. Esther slipped through the arch. Inside, behind a warped board, sat a stack of framed pictures. The glass had clouded. In each frame stood a faint white figure, soft at the edges, like a person made of smoke. "I can't lift them," Esther said. "Jen. Please." Jen crawled in and pulled the frames out one by one. She held the first to the plant's light. The white shape sharpened into a child's face, then a woman's, then Esther's own. "These are the drowned," Jen whispered. "Every soul from that flood. You saved them from the water. You hid their faces so they wouldn't be forgotten." Esther stared. She had died carrying proof that these people existed. That was the unfinished thing. Not the bones. The remembering. "Set them where someone will find them," Esther said. Jen carried the pictures to the shore and lined them on a flat rock, faces turned outward, catching the plant's green glow. She spoke each blurred name she could read from the frames' backs. Esther said them too. The pull in Esther's chest loosened. Not gone, but changed. The water no longer dragged toward the rocks. It sat still. Esther pressed a hand to where the pull had lived and felt open air. "It stopped," she said. Jen looked up, startled. "The chain?" "The chain," Esther said. The nightly drowning was over. Yet something small still tethered her to this place, faint and warm now, pointing not to the water but back toward the hotel. Toward whatever she had left waiting there.