When I heard the news about Jackson Cole, I couldn’t stop thinking about the summer I turned sixteen—the summer I got a job at Cole’s Resort. I wasn’t hired as a lifeguard since I never passed any sort of certification test, but on busy days, my boss would wink and send me out to the beach with my red swimsuit pulled high over my hips, a whistle knotted around my neck. I looked like someone who knew how to swim, though in reality I couldn’t tread water for more than a minute. I was instructed to radio the main office if anything went wrong, and if I had to perform CPR on someone, I was supposed to pound on their heart to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive,” though I didn’t have a great sense of rhythm.
I got really good at working the water slide, a twisted pink tunnel, opaque and rusted, that had been around since the seventies. It cost a dollar to ride, even though it was old and much slower than it had been when I was younger, and most of our customers found it highly disappointing. The denim worn by many of the slide-goers caused the plastic to wear over time (there were no clothing requirements, so long as you wore something. The policies for lifeguards were stricter: Always wear your red suit. No t-shirts, no shorts.).
Despite the “rustic” nature of the resort, I liked working at Cole’s. I liked feeling useful and powerful. I was given the keys to the cash box. I could decide if a boy was too short to ride the water slide. I could call my boss if a drunk customer got too rowdy and reached for my ankles as they plummeted backwards down the slide. And I liked wearing that swimsuit.
What I didn’t like were the janitorial duties: cleaning mouse poop out of the concession stands, tidying the moldy life jackets that hung behind the counter at the ticket booth. Sometimes kids would fill their swim diapers in the splash pool at the bottom of the water slide, and it would be my job to clean it up.
“Anna, we have a Code Brown, halt the riders, over,” my older sister Mia radioed to me on four separate occasions that summer. I often worked at the top of the slide while she took tickets at the bottom. I would have to block off the slide entrance and trudge down the sixty-seven steps that led to the splash pool. Mia, who liked to remind me that she had been promoted to assistant manager, handed me a bucket and I scooped out the offending matter and hurled it farther out into the lake. Twenty yards away, in the section of the lake designated for swimming, customers floated in inner tubes as the excrement drifted ever closer.
Jackson, our boss, never seemed to worry about sanitation, even after the E. coli incident the year before. “It’s a lake,” he said, “not some fancy pool at a country club.” He often assured us that the health inspector wouldn’t come until Labor Day.
It was the same with puke or blood or unidentifiable, bloated animal carcasses in the splash pool. Scoop it out, dump it in a different part of the lake. When a deer corpse blocked the pipes that fueled our water slide, Jackson brought a team of teenaged males to prod the waterlogged animal with canoe paddles until it finally dislodged and floated, half-submerged, toward the fishing docks, where it eventually sank. We soon received reports that the catfish were strangely plentiful in that part of the lake, and that the New Life Church was hosting a fish fry to feed the multitudes who camped in the resort. The event drew a crowd of well over forty, the biggest congregation they’d seen in years. Mia attended with a boy who lifeguarded at the diving docks; she said the fish sandwiches were excellent. I wouldn’t know—I spent that evening making out with another staffer’s boyfriend. Maybe that’s how I missed what was really happening with Mia. Maybe I was so absorbed in my own life that the truth drifted right past me, out into the deepest parts of the lake where I could never swim.
*
It was late August. The locals were all back in school, which meant that the resort was emptying out and Mia and I took on extra shifts. We lived close to the lake, but we attended Prophet’s Bend High, more than a half hour down the road, because our mother thought it was a better school than the one in Fairywood. Our classes didn’t start until the second week of September, since the county fair always took place the first week, and half the school participated in Future Farmers of America. In Fairywood, the land was too hilly and the topsoil was too thin for good farming, and no one had the kind of money it would take to raise cattle.
Despite our supposedly better education, Mia had not applied to any state schools and planned to take courses at the Prophet’s Bend community college that fall. Neither of us had any desire to leave the area. The lake had everything we needed. Mia sometimes talked about her plans for the future: She was going to work her way up, become a manager at Cole’s, and do year-round marketing for the resort. Cole’s was one of the few businesses in the area that always seemed to be doing well, and she wanted to be a part of that. I did, too. Of course I did.
“How’s Lefty doing today? Over,” Mia radioed on a slow, cool morning. The sun had yet to burn away the mist that gathered in clouds over the shadowy parts of the lake.
“Don’t talk about Lefty when I have customers. Over,” I replied.
Lefty was my nipple, which hardened like a third eye on cold days. I had made the mistake of sharing this information with Mia at the start of the summer. Mia mocked me whenever she could, but I was used to people talking about my breasts. By the time I turned twelve, I was wearing a C-cup, even though I was so skinny back then. My male classmates, who were still a full head shorter than me, constantly stared into my chest. In middle school, I walked the hallways with my textbooks pressed up against me like a shield. But at sixteen, I liked the attention I got, even though Mia managed to attract more of it—more lingering looks, more desperate flirtations. There was just something about her.
The top of the water slide was the highest point at Cole’s. I stood there like a cake topper, visible from the beach and the campsites across the lake and the small room behind the reception desk that served as Jackson’s office. I knew Jackson sometimes watched me. We all knew. He was only in his mid-twenties then, not fully in charge, not the wealthy heir he later became. But we knew he had the potential to be someone big, someone important, and we—or at least, I—didn’t expect him not to look at me. I was wearing a swimsuit that was a size too small. I had been ogled since I was twelve.
There was something about Jackson—his bigness, his stubble—that made him show up in my dreams. It started the day he patted me on the head when I was clocking out: he said I was doing a good job, that customers had complimented me. I noticed then that he had a surprisingly floral smell, something sweet and familiar. That night I dreamed of a red-faced Jackson charging up the hill to the water slide. I looked down and I wasn’t wearing any clothes, not even my swimsuit. He tackled me—to protect me from public view, maybe—and I felt the weight of his broad chest, his soft stomach, against my skin, even after I woke up.
*
It was near lunchtime when a boy of five or six climbed to the top of my stairs. He paused, breathing heavily, and put his hands on his knees. I held up my yardstick; he stood to attention and lifted his chin with absolute seriousness.
I pretended to measure him. “I don’t know,” I said doubtfully.
His lip started to wobble.
“Just kidding. Go ahead.”
He took a running leap and dove into the tunnel.
“Feet first!” I called half-heartedly.
When the boy was on the slide, I boosted myself up onto the railing, where I liked to sit on slow days. A family had taken over a nearby picnic table. I could smell cigarettes and French fries. We had no other customers, and the lake, spread out before me, was glass. I can still picture it. It was my favorite view in all of Ohio.
I picked up my radio. “This kid’s about to end up headfirst in the splash pool, in case you want to make sure he doesn’t die of a concussion. Over.”
I could see Mia shaking her head from the ticket booth. “I refuse to administer mouth-to-mouth, over.”
“Like you’d know how.”
“You don’t need a certificate to be an expert in mouth-to-mouth.”
The kid plopped out of the tunnel and doggy paddled to the ladder.
I kicked my feet and turned my ankles in circles, first to the left, then the right. “What’s playing on the radio?”
“Try to guess,” Mia said.
This was one of our games. A wave of static crashed through my walkie-talkie’s speakers; she was holding hers right next to the ancient portable radio. I heard static and then a snippet of a familiar song, soft as an echo. At Mia’s graduation party, the same song had played from a speaker we hooked up in our backyard while our father flipped burgers, his giant overalls cinched up on his chest. Our mother spent the whole party avoiding him, bustling from table to table in the backyard (her backyard now), clipping down the thin plastic tablecloths that reared up in the wind. The song was both celebration and sadness, red caps thrown on the football field.
The static overtook the melody, and Mia released the button.
“I couldn’t really hear it,” I said.
She sighed into her walkie-talkie, a crackle of air. I could hear her chewing on her straw. “That’s another point for me.” She kept score on the boat register we were supposed to use for canoe rentals. “I’m so bored. I might go to the Oasis. Want anything?”
“Just a lemonade,” I said. It was all I ever drank that summer. Mia was partial to a little bit of everything, “suicides” as they were known amongst the staff—a dash of Pepsi, a splash of Sierra Mist, some blue Gatorade for luck.
“I’ll be back in a little bit. Over and out.”
*
As the day crept on, the sky purpled with thunderheads, but still the boy—my only customer—persisted. His parents had bought him twenty slide tickets. He handed me a ticket, threw himself down the tunnel, and emerged a minute or so later at the bottom, tearing from the womb of the slide headfirst, over and over. The monotony was overpowering. My eyes glazed over as I watched the splash pool.
Then it registered in the back of my mind that I hadn’t seen the kid in a while. He had gone down the slide, but I couldn’t remember seeing him emerge. After a few minutes, I started to worry that he was trapped. Mia hadn’t come back from the Oasis, and I could hardly remember the boy’s face. They all looked the same, every kid, every day. I was not equipped to handle crisis situations.
When Mia was sixteen and I was fourteen, Dad had a pulmonary embolism. He hadn’t been doing anything unusual: one minute he was grilling pork chops on the back porch, and the next he couldn’t catch his breath. We thought it must be a heart attack. Mom drove just under ninety miles an hour to get us all to the hospital in time. I sobbed in the back seat while Mia held Dad’s hand.
They saved his life, but they told him he would have to start exercising to keep the blood clots away. He preferred to sit on the couch with his feet propped up on a mound of pillows, his compression stockings casing his legs like sausages.
Our parents had never really seemed to like each other, and Dad’s situation only made things worse. Mom wanted him to exercise. Dad didn’t want to exercise. He took time off from his job at the radio station and she said she didn’t care one way or the other, considering his job had only ever paid peanuts in the first place. He watched TV in the dark, motionless, and she disappeared into the woods for hours at a time, returning with an idea for some new healthy dinner or an activity to get him up and moving. When he wasn’t interested, she’d storm down to the basement, where she walked for hours on her treadmill. He got lost somewhere inside his body, and she got lost trying to reach him there.
They alternated between shouting and crying and discussing divorce in low, deadly voices. I hid in my room blasting Mom’s old Bon Jovi CDs, flexing my ankles every five minutes or so to keep my legs from developing blood clots. I knew it was ridiculous, but I could see some of Dad in my round face, my wide hips.
Mia took after Mom: tall and thin, a jutting collarbone. Delicate and beautiful.
Cue John Miller, nineteen, living with his parents, part-time employee at Bonham’s Lumber. He had the proportions and frown of a basset hound; his eyes were red-rimmed from all the pot he smoked.
I wanted to tell Mia that she could do better, but she never asked me.
Mia ran away with him during one of our parents’ fights, walked right out the back door. It was a Friday night, near eleven o’clock, and none of us heard her go. We didn’t know she was missing until she called the next morning around nine, sobbing and begging for forgiveness. Her phone had died overnight and she assumed we had been trying to get ahold of her.
Mom pretended, for Mia’s sake, that we had all been worried sick. She passed Dad the phone and he grounded her as he sat on the couch watching football highlights, robotically demanding that what’s-his-name bring her home immediately.
Mia told me later that they had only gotten as far as Charleston, a few hours away. I had to pry the details out of her. Apparently John had been driving high, and when they stopped at an all-night pancake place, he ate six chocolate chip waffles without putting down his fork. They had set out with the intention of driving until they made it somewhere new, and since West Virginia looked a whole lot like Ohio, they thought they’d just stop, eat, and push on.
I’m not sure what made her change her mind, but I do know that as she sat with John in that restaurant, Mia put an end to it. Maybe John got a waffle to go.
There were other boys after that. By the time Mia turned seventeen, our parents’ divorce was finalized, and she started dating a twenty-seven-year-old. He was a horse breeder; he came from money. I wondered if he evaluated women the same way he did horses, sizing up their hips and stance and gait. Our parents didn’t know about him, and I never considered telling them. It was a secret I held closely—cherished, even. My sister and the horse breeder. I thought about them pressing together like two figurines, straight arms, unbending knees.
They broke up just before she graduated. I didn’t find out for a few weeks, at least. Though I told myself I knew her better than anyone, the reality was that she never expressed her emotions in ways that I could recognize.
“What do you think of the guy with the shaggy blond hair, the one who works at the go-kart track?” she asked me via walkie-talkie one day, not long after summer began.
“Like, as a friend?” I asked.
“God, no,” she said. “As a man.”
*
“Jackson, pick up. Jackson, we’ve got an incident at the water slide. Call me back.”
Kid still missing, so I tuned my walkie-talkie to the main office’s channel. If Mia was around I would have relied on her judgment; even if she messed up spectacularly, she wouldn’t have gotten in trouble. Earlier in the summer she forgot to lock up the Kiddie Carousel one night and a drunk man was found there in the morning, passed out underneath the purple stallion with an empty fifth of gin in his hand, but Jackson didn’t even reprimand her. He never faulted her for anything. Like all the other men at Cole’s, he seemed to have a soft spot for my sister.
The boy’s family was still gathered at the picnic table nearby. The adults wore trucker’s hats and t-shirts with the sleeves cut out. They were drinking beers from a cooler, blowing smoke rings into the air.
“Jackson, I need you. It’s Anna,” I said again, quietly, into my radio.
No answer. I peered into the slide. I hadn’t been inside it since I was a kid; as I got older, I’d become more and more risk-averse. The splash pool was only four feet deep, so I knew I would be fine even without floaties on my arms. I just had to convince myself to face whatever I would find inside.
I lowered myself to a sitting position, one foot in front of me, then the next. Cool lake water rushed up my back. The tunnel gaped at me, dark pink, and I could see that it would only get darker as it extended beyond the first curve, where the slide pierced the hillside and plunged into blackness.
I took a breath and pushed off into the tunnel. Inside was muted noise, the black thud of my hips thrown around plastic curves. I opened my mouth and tasted iron.
*
When Mia returned home after her night in West Virginia, she slipped into my bedroom. I was listening to something angsty and loud, lying in bed doing ankle exercises. I reached for my nightstand and turned down the volume. She sat at my feet.
“They didn’t notice I was gone, did they?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“As long as we don’t fuck up too hard, they think we’re doing fine.”
“Did you get yourself pregnant? That might catch their attention,” I said.
She grabbed my feet and shoved them off the bed, but I didn’t fall. She got up to leave, and I called after her.
She turned to look at me. I studied her face, her eyes, the way she leaned into her right hip. She looked the same as she always had, but I wondered if inside she was any different.
“You could talk to me,” I said. “I’d understand.”
Her laugh surprised me. Her shoulders shook and she grabbed her stomach. I threw a pillow at her.
“You’ve never done anything, Anna,” she explained. “You never even leave the house. How could you understand?” And she closed the door behind her.
I should have seen it, then, that she wouldn’t stick around for long.
*
I got my wits about me near the bottom of the slide. The sun lit up the tunnel in a dim, throaty pinkness that made me feel like I’d been swallowed. The boy was there—not dead, but alive and content, lurking in a curve where the trickling water of the slide was so weak it was nearly dry. He was sitting hunched over with his feet straight out and his swim trunks ballooning around his scrawny legs, apparently delighted by the fact that he had found a peaceful place to hide from his family. I still remember the look on his face when he saw me coming: he was so disappointed. I had thought he was doing this for attention, but after seeing that face, I wasn’t so sure.
The tunnel was cramped—I couldn’t lift my shoulders all the way up without hitting my head—and as the water dragged me slowly forward, my knee popped the kid in the nose. He wailed and tried to crawl away from me, and in the dim light of the slide I managed to grab the meat of his arm and pull him with me, using my other hand to propel us through the tunnel. The plastic was rough and I was sure I would have scratches on my legs and elbows once we made it through. We rounded a bend and finally entered the splash pool, and droplets of blood from the boy’s nose rained into the water, hanging suspended at the surface before getting swept away.
One of the men from the picnic table greeted us, yanking the boy from the water.
“He’s bleeding. You hit him!” a woman said to me, her face looming over the splash pool as I steadied myself. I coughed and flipped my hair off my forehead. The wind had picked up. I didn’t have a towel. I felt my suit clinging to me, rivulets of lake water running down each strand of my hair.
The woman cradled the boy like a newborn, pressing him into her breast and assuring him that they were never returning to this awful place, never. The man looked at me and I didn’t look away. He broke his gaze first.
It started to rain. Great heaping buckets of rain, as if I’d summoned it myself.
They left and I sat in the ticket booth, shivering. I radioed the main office and got nothing but static. Rain gusted through the open-air ticket counter.
Or maybe it didn’t storm that day. Maybe I’m remembering two days merged into one. It’s so hard to get all the details right, when every day looked just like the next. The important thing here is that I was shivering, waiting and shivering, and all I wanted to do was talk to Mia. I wanted to tell her that I had rescued someone.
*
The storm lasted less than an hour, I think. I stayed in the ticket booth until it cleared, the t-shirt and shorts I brought from home getting soaked over my wet swimsuit. It was past five o’clock and Mia hadn’t returned. I shuttered the ticket window and tallied up the cash we’d made. Fifty bucks.
I went to the main office. Jackson was there with his feet on the counter, acting like he had never left. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt that said Beer Season, sweat stains under his arms.
“Anna banana fo-fanna,” he said in greeting. “Why don’t you come talk to me for a sec.”
In his office—a small closet of a space—he sat in his rolling chair. I remained standing.
“What’s this I hear about a kid stuck in the slide?” he asked, his hands on his knees and his legs spread wide, the fabric of his cargo shorts stretching taut.
There was a stack of papers beside him, crumpled and in disarray. A jumbo, sweating cup stood in a growing puddle beside his mousepad. Behind him, the window framed the waterslide like a picture; I could see the top where I always stood, and even the ticket booth window. The office was perfectly angled to see it all.
“I tried to call you,” I said. “Multiple times. When I couldn’t get ahold of anyone, I—”
“You should never go down the slide after a customer. Not without supervision,” he said.
“I didn’t want to wait. When I couldn’t get you—”
“Why didn’t you call Mia? Wasn’t she working the ticket booth?”
I hesitated and saw, again, the sweating cup. The lid was off, and inside there was a melting pool of brownish blue, like the suicides Mia was always mixing. The straw beside it was chewed flat on one end.
I looked at Jackson and he was smiling. Smug, like he knew something I didn’t know.
“The reception on my walkie-talkie was a little spotty today,” I said. “Maybe it was the storm.”
“It was a real frog drowner, wasn’t it?” he said, still grinning wolfishly. “Good thing you didn’t drown—I don’t pay for that kind of insurance.”
He expected me to laugh, so I did. Looking back after all these years, I want to say there was a certain dread bubbling up inside me then, an instinctive knowledge that something wasn’t right. Sister telepathy.
“Just remember,” Jackson said, leaning forward, “you can always come find me when you’re in trouble.”
I was standing, he was sitting. Middle school all over again, his eyes at breast level.
It’s that look that I remember clearer than anything.
*
A few weeks ago, when Jackson’s name was on the front page of the newspaper, I wasn’t convinced he had done anything wrong. So what if he made his female employees wear a certain kind of swimsuit? So what if he looked? We all know how the world works.
What I kept thinking about, though, was that day in the office, and how it seemed to be connected to a different memory entirely: Makenna Solomon’s sleepover, seventh grade. Amazing I still remembered her name, given that she moved the next year, but every detail of that weekend returned to me as though it had been stored on a special shelf in my mind, carefully preserved for this moment. I had fallen asleep early, and the other girls dug my bra out of my bag—an old lady bra, with cups and wiring—dipped it in water, and stuck it in the freezer. It was the only bra I had brought. The next morning I searched everywhere, frantically, until one of the girls confessed. It was frozen solid. I put it on, pulled my shirt over it and watched the cotton darken with moisture.
They talked about it at school. I got crude notes in my locker from boys who never usually spoke to me, and my friends told me I should appreciate the attention.
I never told Mia. It was the beginning of all the secrets between us.
Mia quit working at Cole’s Resort seemingly out of the blue. She moved away that fall and bailed out of her college classes. She loaded up the Civic and waved as she pulled out of the driveway, no plan, just West, her summer paychecks fueling her trip. It wasn’t her dream to stay in Fairywood, after all. Maybe I had made it all up. Maybe that had always been my dream, and I had conflated the two.
We lost touch for a while. She was slow to get on social media. She didn’t come back home, not even for holidays.
I used to think about her constantly. I had plenty of time to dream up all the possible scenarios, all the reasons she never called. As the months passed and we didn’t hear from her, I thought something terrible must have happened. She’d been kidnapped, murdered, trafficked; she drowned or was in a car accident or fell off a cliff; she was sick or in jail or living on the streets.
I didn’t understand that whatever bad thing had happened to Mia must have happened to her here.
Jackson’s trial is coming up, but no one thinks he’ll go to jail. His young wife died of cancer recently, and most people think it’s unfair to put him through all of this. #MeToo has only ever been a whisper here, a phrase said with a sneer more often than it’s taken seriously. And anyway, Fairywood loves the Coles. I loved them, too—or at least, I loved the resort. I still go there sometimes when the weather is warm.
When the allegations first came out, I wasn’t sure if I should call Mia. I sat in the break room—I’m a phlebotomist now out in Prophet’s Bend—and I rolled my ankles, twisted my wrists, debating.
I finally dialed her number as I drove home, past the resort, past the water slide looming in the distance. I didn’t want my husband to hear the call. He went to school with Jackson and remembers him as a nice guy, a little awkward, who always had trouble fitting in. My husband, like many of the men I work with, doesn’t understand why anyone would come forward now, after so many years. He doesn’t think their stories could possibly be accurate, and I understand his doubt. I have trouble organizing my own memories, presenting them in some order that makes sense.
Mia is in Arizona, the opposite of here. I wanted to tell her about that time I went to Jackson’s office, the way he looked at me, that stupid cup on his desk with the straw all chewed up. I needed her to tell me what happened. I danced around the words: Do you remember…?
Instead we talked about the weather, summer plans, and reality T.V.. I had her on my car phone as I drove out to my home in the country, and when I dipped into a wooded curve in the road, I heard a patch of static over the line. Suddenly I saw her at the ticket counter, her chin propped in her hand, walkie-talkie raised to her lips, and the lake stretched out behind her, reflecting the hills that couldn’t keep her.
Holly Hilliard is a graduate of the MFA program at NC State University, where she was the 2018 winner of the James Hurst Prize for Fiction. She now lives in Pittsburgh, PA. Find her online at hollyhilliard.com.