It’s the best first date I’ve ever heard of.
Amelia smiled big and nodded.
“Yes?” James said, not sure he’d read her right.
How can I say no?
“How can I say no? Canoeing with a stranger? Yes. I’d love to.”
Both seventeen. Both afraid. But both saying yes.
James ran sweaty hands through his brown hair then wiped them again on his apron. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen her in his father’s store. It was the fourth.
“My name is Amelia,” she said, wondering if he already knew that, if he’d found her online.
“James,” he said and smiled, too. “And wow was I nervous to ask you out.”
“Really?” She asked it earnestly but knew he was. The fidgeting revealed that. She was anxious, too. “Why?”
James snorted a single awkward chuckle.
“You know...boy girl...people meet...I don’t know! It’s scary!”
Amelia laughed. It felt good to have a boy ask her out. God, it felt great. How long had it been since she’d gone on a date? And here, at the very onset of summer, it felt...natural.
A new day.
A new season.
And a yes to a stranger who’d asked her to go canoeing for a first date.
“Cool,” Amelia said. “It’s green.”
It was cool. A green canoe with brown trim. It looked like the kind of canoe you’d find in a history book, two Native Americans seated inside.
“It’s sturdy, too,” James’s uncle Bob said. His jean shorts and open flannel were straight out of 1995. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t tip.”
Amelia and James exchanged glances. They were already ankle-deep in the cold water.
They hardly knew each other at all.
“We won’t stand up in her,” James said. “I know better.”
“I do, too,” Amelia said.
“You’ve canoed before?” Uncle Bob asked her.
Amelia blushed. “I wouldn’t say I’ve canoed, you know, but I’ve been in one. Yeah. Is that canoeing?”
Uncle Bob laughed and lifted the paddles from inside the boat.
“These are solid cherrywood. Don’t ask why. Trish wanted them that way. I don’t think she’s used them since we got them. But heck, you two get to use some pretty fancy paddles.”
Bob eyed the cooler James had already placed in the canoe.
“I don’t mind if you two have some beers out there, but be careful, all right?” He turned to Amelia. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
Bob considered this. But not for very long.
“This is the lake,” James said. Then he snapped his fingers, like trying to catch the words as they left him. Of course it was the lake.
“It’s gorgeous,” Amelia said.
James was paddling on the right side of the canoe. Amelia paddled on the left and steered.
Her eyes traveled to the rippling surface of the water.
It was a great blue, the kind of blue you painted.
Amelia felt like she was painting, the oar as her brush. As though all this beauty fanned out from the simple motions she and James made.
“What do you think is down there?” she asked. Then wished she hadn’t. The question made it sound like she was scared. What’s in there? I mean...what kind of fish?
She didn’t have the heart to tell James that his shorts were hanging a little low and she could see the very top of his plumber’s crack.
Plumber’s crack. Hardware store. This made her smile.
“All kinds,” James said, not sure of the answer. “Bass...I think.”
He wanted to tell her there was something magical in this lake. A buried treasure. A mysterious shipwreck. A monster.
He also regretted sitting up front. He couldn’t see her from here.
He turned around to face her.
Amelia didn’t think it was possible—it was, after all, very unlikely—but the second lake was more beautiful than the first.
And more remote.
It was smaller by a third of the size, she guessed, and the shores were so crowded with trees that it appeared there was no land there at all.
Like the water is supported by trees, a lake on stilts.
And the water!
Gorgeous. Not like the tropical beaches she’d seen in pictures, even better than that. The clearest she’d ever seen.
“This is...” she started to say but stopped. She stopped paddling, too. Laid the oar across her legs, rolled up her sleeves, and just saw.
James continued to paddle, but slow, taking it in, too.
Amelia listened to the canoe cut the cool surface, the only sound out here, as if all the fish were sleeping. She caught a reflection in the water, her reflection, her face a rippling disk amid auburn straw.
The green body of the canoe looked like it belonged here, like it was a part of the second lake. Like it was made for it.
She looked ahead, silently thanking James, and saw he had his oar across his legs, too. He was looking to the right, she could see his profile clearly, and she was very glad she’d said yes to his offer.
“You hungry?” James asked, still looking to the right, to the shoreline of heavy trees.
“What did you do on some of your other first dates?” James called over his shoulder.
“What?”
“What were some of your other first dates like?”
“Nothing like this,” she called. “Movies. Dinner.”
Good, James thought.
“The movies is a bad first date,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Even if the movie is good.”
“Yeah.”
Amelia considered saying something clever like, You can learn a lot about somebody by sitting in the dark with them for two hours. But she didn’t say it because she didn’t really believe it.
“I had one date,” she said, paddling, steering, “where this guy took me to his parents’ ranch in Obega.”
“That sounds all right.”
“His parents were there.”
“Wow. You met his parents on the first date?”
“Yep. I did.”
James laughed. Amelia laughed. They were free about their laughter but there was something anxious about it, too.
“You see that tangle of brush just below the concrete?” she asked.
“I do, yeah.”
Straightaway the canoe scraped against the concrete walls of the tunnel and James thought about his uncle Bob.
Shit. The paint.
The green paint. Chipping.
The canoe fit. But just.
It was so tight they couldn’t use their paddles. Couldn’t even lay the paddles across their knees. James laid his on the floor instead. Amelia did the same. They pushed their way through the tunnel with their fingers and palms.
They didn’t speak of not doing it. They didn’t speak of backing out.
Amelia was surprised when James pulled a flashlight from his backpack. It underscored how dark it was in here.
It felt like they were going to get stuck, over and over, too tight, the tunnel narrowing. But the tunnel didn’t narrow, and they didn’t get stuck. Just more of the scraping and chipping.
Halfway through they had to duck and two-thirds of the way they had to really duck, until their shoulders were between their knees.
“Like a coffin,” Amelia said. It sounded funnier in her head. James was breathing hard. It wasn’t easy work.
“Look at this one,” he said, bent completely at the waist, shining the light on the wall, an inch from the side of the canoe.
It was a stick-figure woman with enormous tits. Something like milk was squirting out of them. A second stick-figure woman was on her knees, tongue out, to accept it.
The third lake felt inhabited. Or like it once was. Or maybe it was just that whoever used the service drive came here often enough to leave some energy behind.
“Deliverance,” Amelia said. But that was silly. They weren’t in the backwoods of Tennessee. And besides, that’s what everybody said when they were in a canoe and felt a little weird about their surroundings.
The shoreline was crowded with tall pines that rose from dark-green shrubs.
The water was murky, as if the mud from the lake floor had come up to see who had cleared the tunnel.
“I can’t believe my uncle never told me about this,” James said.
But Amelia thought she understood. Given the grandeur and beauty of the first two lakes, there was no reason to ever visit this third one. It was an afterthought. The clogged gutter of an otherwise beautiful home.
And there was a smell to it, too. Not quite garbage, but like personal belongings no longer needed. Amelia had smelled something like it at estate sales with her mom and dad.
“That’s it,” Amelia said.
“What’s it?” They were paddling again, going farther from the tunnel, getting closer to the middle of the new lake.
“It feels like we’re seeing something we shouldn’t be seeing. Something private.”
James cocked his head to the sky.
“Do you smell that?” he asked.
“I think so,” she said. But she wondered what he thought it was. “What do you smell?”
“Old age!” He turned around and smiled at her.
Amelia smiled, too. She thought of the first lake. Should they go back to it?
“It’s not so bad,” she said, wanting to remain positive. “If this was the first lake we saw today, I don’t think it’d look so dismal.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It’s all about comparisons.”
“I think I’d’ve felt the same.”
“Even if we hadn’t seen the other two?”
“But we did see the other two.”
“We did.”
It wasn’t small, but it wasn’t huge, either; about half the size of the first lake and two-thirds that of the second. There were fewer trees at the shoreline, and they could see where the mountains slipped coldly into the water. They were paddling toward them.
Unvisited.
The word seemed to float up and out of the water, slip wet into Amelia’s mind.
“Are you hungry still?” James asked. “We didn’t really finish our lunch.”
The question was jarring, Amelia thought. Out of place. But why?
Because you guys were eating lunch on the second lake. This is the third lake now. Things are different here.
She looked over the edge of the canoe. A fish floated on its side, a foot below the surface.
Dead, Amelia thought.
But it was more like the fish was looking up, looking at her.
“I’m okay,” she said, but the fish unnerved her. Was something wrong with the water? Dead fish in a lake was, of course, natural. But it was more about the look in the fish’s eye, like they’d made actual eye contact, fish and girl.
“I’m always hungry,” James said. “As a kid I used to eat two...holy shit!”
Amelia looked quickly to James. She’d been thinking of the fish when he yelled. Was he yelling about the fish?
“What?” Amelia asked. Scared. “What?”
He lifted his paddle out of the water and Amelia did the same.
James was staring at the lake’s surface, wide-eyed, too wide-eyed.
Amelia looked.
She saw it, too.
A roof.
“Oh God,” she said. “Oh my God.”
They drifted past it, over it, a small bird in its sky, a tiny airplane for two.
“Was that a...” James started but couldn’t finish.
“Yes,” Amelia said. “That was a house.”
It was true then; they’d both seen it. A house. Submerged. A rooftop beneath the surface. And yet it was so dark down there...
James snapped back first, jammed his paddle into the water, and started paddling in the opposite direction, driving the canoe in reverse. Amelia did the same.
Then they drifted.
Over the house again.
The house.
Underwater.
Without speaking, they gripped the edge of the canoe at the same time, their fingertips touching the chipped paint. Sunlight tap-danced across the surface, a glittering curtain, a welcoming, a reveal. But not much of one.
“Oh my God,” Amelia said again.
It’s all she could think to say.
“It’s huge,” James said.
If the shingled roof was any indication, it was a big house.
Beneath them.
Underwater.
They looked at each other at the same time and it was stated silently that they were going to check it out. They were going to go into the water. No self-respecting seventeen-year-olds on a first date could paddle away from this.
But first, for a minute or two, for now...they just stared.