PART 2: The Empty Jet Ski
For a few seconds nobody moved. I remember that more clearly than almost anything else. My father’s hands were still gripping my shoulders, my mother’s fingers still dug into my arm, and the three of us stood frozen on the dock like people in a photograph, listening to water lap against wood.
"He probably just stalled it," my father said at last. But his voice cracked on the last word, and I knew that even he did not believe it.
I tore free from both of them. I did not think. I ran down the dock and along the shoreline toward the neighbor’s property, the vest swinging from my fist, and I screamed for help. A man in a faded Navy cap was untying a pontoon boat from the next dock over. His name was Mr. Ortega. He had lived on that cove for thirty years and had watched me grow up.
"Mr. Ortega, my daughter is out there!" I gasped. "Kyle took her on the jet ski. The engine just died, and she doesn’t have a vest. Please!"
He did not ask one question. He just held out his hand and pulled me onto the deck. "Hold on to something," he said, and he opened the throttle.
Behind us, I could hear my cousin’s son Mason, who was fourteen, shouting from the porch. He had a phone pressed to his ear. "I’m calling 911! I’m calling right now!" It was the last thing I heard before the wind swallowed the sound.
The pontoon rounded the point in under a minute. Cedar Cove opened up in front of us, wide and glittering and cruelly beautiful in the afternoon sun. Fishing boats and skiffs dotted the far shore. Somewhere a radio played a country song. It looked like a postcard, and my daughter was lost somewhere inside it.
"There!" Mr. Ortega pointed. About two hundred yards ahead, the blue and yellow jet ski sat motionless, rocking gently on the swells.
There was one person on it.
I stood at the bow, gripping the rail so hard my knuckles turned white, and I counted the heads over and over as though counting could change the number. There was my brother, slumped across the seat. There was nobody else. No small braids. No pink swimsuit. Just the water, green and endless, spreading out on all sides.
"Poppy!" I screamed. "POPPY!" My voice cracked and tore. I turned in circles on the deck, searching the surface for a small hand, a splash, anything. The lake gave nothing back.
Mr. Ortega pulled alongside the jet ski, and I was over the rail before the boats touched. I grabbed Kyle by the front of his gray tank top and hauled him upright. His sunglasses slid down his forehead. His eyes were red and unfocused, and he smelled like a brewery.
"Where is she?" I shook him. "Kyle, where is my daughter?"
"She’s…" He blinked at me slowly, then gave a short, uneasy laugh. "She jumped off. I told her not to. I said, ‘Pops, don’t do it,’ and she just, she wanted to swim. She was right behind me, Han. She was right here."
"She can barely swim!" I could hear myself howling. "She has no vest, Kyle! She has no vest!"
"She had it on," he said, and his brow furrowed as if he were trying to solve a math problem. "Didn’t she? I thought she had it on."
I let go of him and he nearly slid off the seat. I looked at the water, at the long wake line fading behind the jet ski and the rippling circle of empty surface around us, and a cold certainty settled in my stomach. In that moment Kyle was not my brother, and he was not a problem to be managed. He was the reason my child was somewhere under that lake.
"How long ago?" Mr. Ortega demanded from the pontoon. His voice had gone hard and steady, the voice of a man who had once run a ship. "Kyle! How long since she went in?"
"I don’t know." Kyle’s grin had finally collapsed. His hands shook as he rubbed his face. "Ten minutes? I fell asleep for a second, I think. I just closed my eyes. The engine, I think I hit the kill switch."
"You fell asleep," I whispered.
"Hannah—"
I did not hear the rest. I kicked off my sandals, took the empty orange vest from where I had dropped it, and pulled it over my own head, because it was the only thing I had that had touched her. Mr. Ortega was shouting something about waiting for the patrol boat. In the distance, I heard the first thin wail of a siren echoing across the water.
I took one long breath and dove.
The lake closed over my head like a green door. The sunlight died within an arm’s length. I opened my eyes and saw only swirling silt and the dim shapes of my own hands. I kicked down, then down again, and screamed her name into the water, a useless sound that came out as bubbles.
I surfaced gasping, shook the hair from my eyes, and screamed it again above the surface. "POPPY!"
Nothing. Only the siren, growing louder.
Then, just as I was about to dive a second time, Mr. Ortega’s voice cut across the water, strange and tight. "Hannah. Don’t move. Look at your right."
I turned my head slowly. Floating twenty feet away, bobbing on the swells, was a small pink hair tie with a plastic strawberry on it, one of the two that held Poppy’s braids that morning.
