Derek awakes to what he thinks is a nightmare, until he recalls the accident, the images of his mother’s car careening over the side of the bridge and seeing nothing but blue skies. He recalls his mother, Tammy, fighting to free him from his seatbelt as the car sinks further down into the darkness of the lake. Derek can see her fear which leads to his own as his mind realizes what’s happening. He watches as his mother takes a deep breath only to be filled with water, the same dark water that fill’s his lungs. Voices in the distance pull him out of his trance as he turns to see a young boy, Robert fishing, with (he assumes) his father. He gets up to move closer so he can watch the two of them and welcome what he misses so dearly, companionship.
Excerpt
What is that? Thought Eva as she squinted to see under the water. There was something shining under the water. I wonder if I can walk under the water now that I am…. Dead, Eva thought as she stepped into the water and walked toward the light. The water didn’t feel cold and it didn’t feel warm, either. It was strange to Eva that she didn’t feel the water, like she didn’t really feel anything she touched. She continued to walk toward the shining object until the water reached her chin. Eva took a deep breath just in case, then stepped under the water. She didn’t feel the usual pressure you feel if you had your breath held so she decided to open her mouth and see what happened. I can’t die twice now, can I? Thought Eva, as she breathed in the water. The water didn’t feel any different than the air. Eva, looking around under the water, her hair floating around her face, focused on the object reflecting light to the surface. It was a car.
It’s Derek’s mother’s car! I can’t believe it. She halfway ran, halfway floated to it. She planted her face against the window of the driver’s side of the car and looked in. Eva was disappointed not to find Derek’s body strapped in the front seat like she expected. He had told her that the booster seat wouldn’t unlock for him to get out. Where is he? Eva backed away from the car and looked around the bottom of the lake. She walked at least a half a mile back toward the other side of the lake when she saw a shoestring floating in the water from the bottom of the lakebed. It looked like a worm or something from a far, but when she got closer, she saw it was a shoestring. Eva bent down to get the string and found that it was attached to a shoe that had been buried under the muck. Her eyes widened as she recognized the shoe. It looked like the shoestrings he had on his feet. Eva quickly started to move the muck around on her hands and knees. She knew he was here somewhere. She felt around with her hands more so than looked, since the muck made the water mucky and hard to see through. She stopped when she felt something strange. She tried to pick it up, but it was stuck in the ground. She decided that she’d wait until the water cleared where she could see. Given time, she looked down at the bones of Derek. His pants were still on him and the same shirt that he had on over at Robert’s was waving in the water against his chest bones.
Eva let out a cry that the wolves of the forest would have been startled by. She lifted Derek’s body out of the bottom of the lake and took them to the shore. She knelt beside the bones and cried. Her feelings were more than she had expected. Although she had grown attached to Derek, she hadn’t realized that the feeling of knowing he was lost and she could help him would make her so happy and sad at the same time. She knew how he’d feel when he saw the bones. She knew how she had felt when she saw her body laying on the ground, not moving. It's a feeling that can’t be described, no matter how you try.
Eva, feeling like her heart had been torn from her chest, stood and looked around the woods where she was standing.
“I can’t just leave them here. What if some kind of animal gets them. Where can I put them?” Eva asked herself. She noticed something that looked familiar. “Wait, his house; it’s just over the hill. I remember these woods from when I met Derek. He walked me over the bridge and down into the woods.” Eva picked up Derek’s bones and carried them through the woods to the house where Derek and she stayed. For some reason that she couldn’t explain to herself, she took Derek’s bones to the room at the top of the stairs and laid them on the floor. She then went back outside to her spot in the woods. She felt the urge to be there, even thought she couldn’t figure out why. You would think you would never want to be there again, but she felt she needed to be there. Maybe it was to find Derek, and maybe it was to help find herself. She hadn’t talked to God in who knew when but she felt that he had answered her prayer right then. She was overjoyed with the fact that she now knew God had never given up on her.
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